Renzo Piano's vision of Klee, molded by the landscape

Strangely perhaps, in a land dominated by the Alps, the countryside around the Swiss capital is shaped by rolling hills that invite nothing more dramatic than unhurried contemplation.

And it was this, both mood and look, that Renzo Piano sought to evoke when he added an $86 million museum, the Paul Klee Center, to the orderly Bern landscape.

The results are both striking and discreet. The center's three round "hills" are etched and molded in a stainless steel that mirrors the sky, while their sloping roofs disappear under a field of barley. Thus the three basic tenets of Klee's semi-abstract work line, form and color are present. And by chance, a mere 100 yards, or 90 meters, away, is the Schosshalden Cemetery, where Klee is buried.

The center, in a way, is a typical Piano museum, but typical only in that, when planning a museum, Piano noted, he does not work from a template but instead allows the location and purpose of each project to define the design. And this at least explains how the contrasting styles of, say, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Paul Klee Center can be the work of the same architect.

"You first try to listen to what the site has to tell you, because the shadow of the design is already there," Piano, 67, said over breakfast a few days before the center opened to the public on June 20. "Here, the other inner voice is that of Paul Klee. You don't create a Paul Klee building, but you can think of the poetic Paul Klee. Nature is always in his work: birds, trees, colors, North Africa."

Still, in this case, Piano, who has also designed The New York Times's new headquarters in New York, was treading sensitive ground.

Klee, who was born in Bern in 1879 and died there in 1940, is a favorite son; before the project went ahead, it had to be approved by referendum. He is also a national treasure who, with Alberto Giacometti and Jean Tinguely, comprise Switzerland's main contribution to 20th-century art.

Like Giacometti and Tinguely, Klee also left home to make his name, moving in his late teens to Munich, where he studied art, earned his keep as a musician and, in 1906, married Lily Stumpf. In 1920, he was invited to teach at the Bauhaus design school in Weimar and, later, Dessau. In 1930, he became a professor at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Art, only to be dismissed when the Nazis came to power three years later. He then returned to Bern.

While Klee's mother was Swiss, his father was German, and under Swiss law, that also made Klee a German. When World War II broke out, he hurriedly sought Swiss nationality but died before the request was approved. The fact that he, his wife, and their son, Felix, were German nationals would in time become central to the story of why the Paul Klee Center now houses 4,000 of the artist's works, some 40 percent of his entire output.

In 1946, to pre-empt the seizure of Klee's estate as war reparations, his widow sold her legacy of 4,000 artworks to three Swiss friends, who, after her death that same year, created the Klee Society and, later, the Paul Klee Foundation. Then, in 1949, after imprisonment in the Soviet Union, Felix Klee returned to Bern to claim his inheritance and recovered some 1,450 works. When he died in 1990, 650 works went to his widow, Livia, and 800 to his son from an earlier marriage, Alexander.

Almost immediately, Alexander Klee proposed the creation of a Klee museum. And after this was approved by the city and canton in 1997, Livia Klee donated her works to the foundation, while Alexander Klee offered his on permanent loan. Then, in 1998, the prominent (and wealthy) Swiss orthopedic surgeon Maurice Muller, and his wife, Martha, agreed to finance the museum, but only if it were built on land they owned in Schongrun, a Bern suburb.

Muller laid down two other conditions. Rather than a traditional museum, he wanted a cultural center that would embrace Klee's second great love, music. He also insisted that it be designed by Piano, whom he met through a mutual friend, the pianist Maurizio Pollini. In exchange, the Mullers contributed $47 million to the project; another $25 million came from private sponsors, and $14 million from the national lottery.

In the manner of architects, the first undulating line drawn by Piano in 1998 defined the museum's look. In its finished form, there are three glass-faced "hills" of descending height and size: the first with reception areas, a children's museum and a 300-seat underground concert hall; the second with two floors for the permanent collection and temporary shows; and the third for offices and storage.

The three "hills" are connected by a promenade, which Piano has named Museum Street. From its windows, grass can be seen creeping over the sloping roofs. The proximity of nature is reinforced by the building's white oak floors and wooden staircases. And in the gallery for the permanent collection, "to create a sense of lightness," as he put it, Piano has suspended the dividing walls from the ceiling.

"The aim is calm, serenity, silence," he said.

It is a mood that suits Klee's art. The 200 paintings and drawings initially chosen to represent the collection cover the artist's entire career, starting with early works that display little of his later penchant for experimentation. But famously, when he visited Tunisia in 1914, he discovered color. "I don't have to try to capture it," he announced upon his return to Munich. "It will possess me always."

He first expressed this in what became known as his "square paintings," actually squares, triangles and semicircles of sun- splashed North African colors. When, after 1920, Klee joined his friend Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus, he began adding lines some semi-figurative, some geometric to the colored backdrops. And, as always, both as a teacher and an inveterate researcher, he sought to explain his work.

Of his obsession with the line, he wrote: "The original movement, the agent, is a point that sets itself in motion (genesis of form). A line comes into being. It goes for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of a walk."

The first temporary show here is called "Never a Day Without a Line," and it brings together 200 line drawings and watercolors that he created around 1939. Little wonder that he left 10,000 works, as well as some 4,000 pages of analytical text.

Along with presenting the world's largest collection of Klee works, however, the new center also promises what it calls a "Klee experience," including concerts by a newly formed Paul Klee Ensemble, and theater productions with decor evocative of Klee's work. Children are invited to their own museum, Creaviva, while every summer a dozen or so young international artists will join academics, curators and critics at a 10-day seminar here.

For Piano, though, the "Klee experience" also continues in the center's 10 acres, or four hectares, of land: What looks like a concave hillside of cereal crops was reshaped to harmonize with the center's own "hills." "When I first saw the plot for the center, I said we'd need four times as much land," Piano recalled. "Now they see why."

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