Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer. Harvard Art Museums Director Tom Lentz (from left) moderated a discussion with MoMA Director Glenn Lowry, A.M. ’78, Ph.D. ’82, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities Jennifer Roberts, and Paul Ha, director, List Visual Arts Center at MIT.

Thanks to the Harvard Gazette for this story about museums functioning as inclusive, modern learning laboratories:

In the 1970s, the Italian architect Renzo Piano was a young upstart with immense talent and brazen daring. It was then, still fairly early in his career, that Piano and his partner, the architect Richard Rogers, redefined the architectural landscape with their groundbreaking Pompidou Center in Paris.

The home of the largest modern art museum in Europe, the building’s exposed ventilation ducts, brightly colored pipes, and covered escalators crisscrossing its façade angered much of the public long before it opened its doors in 1977. During its construction, a group of French intellectuals wrote a letter condemning the building they feared would disgrace Paris.

But rants soon turned to raves, and the Pompidou was hailed as a masterpiece.

The work marked a fundamental shift for the future of architecture. Now, many observers expect that Piano’s newly renovated and expanded Harvard Art Museums will help mark another fundamental shift, this time in the way people engage and connect with great works of art. The museums open to the public on Nov. 16.

Piano’s Harvard arts project is being heralded as much for the exterior and its stunning glass roof as for its innovative new interior layout, programmed by museum officials to encourage visitors to slow down, look closely, and connect with art in new ways.

With the imminent reopening of the Harvard Art Museums after six years, the question of how to engage visitors, both from the academic community and the public, into greater conversation and connection with today’s university museums was the subject of a panel discussion Thursday at the Northwest Science Building, a session introduced by Harvard President Drew Faust.

“Today we hope to generate a conversation about what that means for this University, this city, and the world, and about what the museum might mean for all of us,” said Faust, who had convened an arts task force in 2008 to explore ways to integrate those areas more fully into campus life. “This is not just the old museum opening up again. This is something quite new. … Renzo’s breathtaking spaces, the Calderwood Courtyard turned into a public square, the marvelous classrooms and auditorium, and the museum as teaching machine. How do we integrate that into our curriculum and into our lives?”…

Read the whole story here.