The Menil Collection

Dominique de Menil, a daughter of Conrad Schlumberger, and her husband John began collecting in Europe in 1931 and moved to Houston in 1941, when John took charge of Schlumberger's office there. They set up the Menil Foundation in 1954, backed the city's museums and universities, and built the Rothko Chapel as their first project of their own. By John's death in 1973 they owned more than 10,000 works, and they had agreed to keep them together.

Dominique de Menil wanted a building "small on the outside and big on the inside." Renzo Piano, working with Houston's Richard Fitzgerald and Partners, gave her a long, low museum clad in grey wood siding with white trim, sized to the bungalows around it. With the engineer Peter Rice he lit the galleries with daylight deflected by 300 ferro-cement leaves. It opened on June 7, 1987.

The collection runs from antiquity and the arts of Oceania and the Pacific Northwest to Cubism and Surrealism, with more than 1,000 works by Max Ernst and some of Magritte's best-known paintings. The campus now covers thirty acres, with the Cy Twombly Gallery, the Menil Drawing Institute and the Dan Flavin installation at Richmond Hall. The galleries carry no explanatory wall text, by design. Photography is not allowed inside.