Daniel Zalewski

On a drizzly September afternoon in the Baroque heart of St. Petersburg, Koolhaas conferred with two young colleagues in a corridor outside the office of Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum. Shortly, he would present his proposal for an “invisible” addition to the museum. At Koolhaas’s request, one of his associates extracted a model from a container the size of a shoebox. It was a blunt geometric form, suggesting, in profile, the lid of a grand piano. It was also braz…