The Asia Society Texas Center has been providing previews of its new headquarters building in a series of private events, but Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi’s new Museum District landmark isn’t scheduled to open to the public until the second half of a 4-day celebration beginning April 12th. By then the $48.4 million modern building will be outfitted with an exhibition of Asian art from the Rockefeller Collection.
In the meantime, the organization has released to Swamplot a more complete set of images than what’s been available so far — documenting photographer Paul Hester‘s take on the ins and outs of the new 38,000-sq.-ft. structure on Southmore Blvd. between Caroline and Austin:
A passerby notes there’s construction going on at 5512 La Branch, around the corner from the Children’s Museum. Going in at that address: 
“I don’t know whether he gets to take those paintings with him, but it looks like he’s in for an upgrade in the office department,” notes a reader commenting on the back-of-house museum real estate awaiting newly announced MFAH director Gary Tinterow in Houston. For a spread in the New York Social Diary last year, photographer Jill Krementz took this snapshot of the curator in front of the neater of the 2 desks in his park-view office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The director’s office at MFAH doesn’t exactly look out on to Central Park, but it’s much bigger.” (It faces a walled-in garden space shielded from Montrose Blvd. traffic.) And Tinterow’s new salary may afford him the opportunity to upgrade from the IKEA floor lamp highlighted in Krementz’s office tour. “Also, fun fact,” notes our reader: “Late MFAH director Peter Marzio never had a computer. They were just kinda beneath him, I guess. The only thing on his huge desk was a red telephone. It looked like a White House War Room or something.” [
Future architect 
Count the creation of Isamu Noguchi’s Cullen Sculpture Garden, the addition of the Rienzi estate, and construction of the Rafael Moneo-designed Beck Building as just a few of the accomplishments of the Museum of Fine Arts’ longtime director, who died last night at the age of 67. But more was being planned: “
