Of all the buildings designed by Renzo Piano, the one that continues to be most enthusiastically admired is the 1983 IBM traveling exhibition pavilion. Other Piano designs may be better known or more frequently praised, but none has the power to drive his admirers to such extremes of detail in their explanations, to such efforts to find the words to describe the goodness of his design and execution. The reasons why the building provokes such admiration are easy to understand: as a faceted, glazed envelope that has usually been seen in the middle of gardens, it fulfills the ancestral visions of the Modem Movement, from Paul Schoerbart's Glasarchitekrur to Joseph Paxion's Crystal Palace, and even further back in time, being light, transposable and provisional, it fulfills the dreams of more recent visionaries like Buckminster Fuller; its non-rectangular profile satisfies the postmodem aversion to the elementary solids of the International Style...[+]