Art
Contemporary art gets a worthy home
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, December 10, 2006
BOSTON — It took a while — 70 years, to be exact — but America’s oldest contemporary art museum finally has a home worthy of its cutting-edge reputation.
True, the new Institute of Contemporary Art isn’t quite as photogenic as Frank Gehry’s flamboyant Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain or Richard Meier’s equally heralded Getty Center in Los Angeles. Yet with its glass-clad lower floors and soaring top-floor cantilever, the building, which opens to the public today, certainly makes a statement.
More importantly, the ICA’s interior spaces are gorgeous, offering stunning views of Boston Harbor and the South Boston waterfront while providing a seamless mix of traditional gallery spaces and cutting-edge media and performance areas.
In fact, the building’s most notable design feature may be the equal weight it gives to traditional art forms such as painting and sculpture and more avant-garde fields such as computer, video and performance art.
Designed by New York-based architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and located in Boston’s rapidly developing Fan Pier area, the new ICA might be the country’s first truly 21st-century art museum.
Consider, for example, the prominence given to the ICA’s new 325-seat theater. In most museums, the theaters and auditoriums are purely functional spaces, typically separated from other museum activities. Certainly that was true at the ICA’s former digs on Boylston Street, where the windowless basement-level auditorium easily could have doubled as a Cold War fallout shelter.
The new theater, by contrast, straddles the museum’s second and third floors and offers spectacular views of the Boston waterfront and skyline. Rather than a windowless bunker, it feels more like a glass-enclosed observation platform. The theater’s importance is also apparent from the outside, where the eye-catching rows of bright orange seats are visible even from a distance.
Besides offering a stunning setting for films, lectures and musical and theater performances, the theater illustrates the growing importance of performance and media-based artworks in contemporary art. Where art lovers once flocked to museums to view relatively static paintings and sculptures, they’re now just as likely to come for live performance and multimedia pieces.
And don’t worry about the views distracting the audience: the floor-to-ceiling glass panels that enclose the theater on the north and west sides are equipped with special high-tech screens that can be raised and lowered depending on the event.
Visually, the theater is also linked to another prominent design element: a step-shaped seating area that overlooks Boston Harbor on the museum’s north side. Sheltered by the museum’s dramatic top-floor cantilever, it looks like the perfect place to chill out on a hot summer afternoon.
Follow the terrace-like seats up the side of the building, meanwhile, and you’ll find that they start precisely where the back edge of the theater stage ends. The result: a continuous ribbon of seating connecting outside and inside.
As for the museum’s more traditional gallery spaces, they’re located on the top (fourth) floor. Here you’ll find the museum’s temporary exhibitions (the opening show, “Super Vision,” examines how new technologies are changing the way we perceive the world), as well as selections from the ICA’s small but growing permanent collection.
Anyone who remembers the old ICA, with its split-level layout and vision-blocking central staircase, will be happy to know that these new galleries are exquisite: big, high-ceilinged spaces that complement the art without competing with it. The lighting system, which delivers plenty of natural light through ceiling-mounted screens and skylights, is equally good.
As a final touch, the fourth floor offers what may be the best water view in Boston. That’s the view from the north side, where a massive 80-foot cantilever forms a soaring balcony over Boston Harbor.
The effect — at once dizzying and exhilarating — is repeated in the “Mediatheque,” a small, steeply angled space that juts out from the underside of the cantilever. Indeed, the view from the Mediatheque is even more intense — a swirling, water-filled panorama that will thrill some visitors while causing others to reach for nearest bottle of Dramamine.
Fittingly, this sensory-scrambling space houses the ICA’s new digital media center.
Such architectural sleights-of-hand are typical of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, the husband-and-wife design team selected by the ICA in 2001. That same year, for example, the pair earned international acclaim for the so-called “Blur Building” — a lakefront pavilion equipped with a special water-spray system that kept it permanently shrouded in mist.
Unlike many architects, Diller and Scofidio (a third partner, Charles Renfro, joined the firm in 2004) are also successful visual artists with a long list of museum shows and installations to their credit. That appealed to ICA officials, who wanted their new museum to strike a balance between bold design and basic functionality.
“The fact Ricardo and Elizabeth could approach the project both as artists and as architects was a major plus,” says ICA director Jill Medvedow. “We didn’t want a building that looked great but failed as a working museum.”
The relatively large amount of space devoted to non-traditional art forms also reflects the ICA’s own history of supporting new areas of creative expression. Founded in 1936, the ICA (then known as the Boston Museum of Modern Art) mounted the first American museum exhibitions devoted to the work of Cubist master Georges Braque and Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. In the 1960s, it was among the first museums to exhibit the work of Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
More recently, the ICA has championed the work of younger, media-savvy artists such as Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman and Bill Viola. Other exhibits have explored the impact of advertising and comics on contemporary art.
Now ICA curators will have even more room to work with. The new building more than triples the museum’s exhibition space to 17,000 square feet (compared with about 5,000 square feet at the old Back Bay location). In addition, the $40-million project features a host of new public amenities, including a two-story education center and first-floor café with sweeping views of Boston Harbor. The café, which can be opened up in warm weather, will be managed by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck.
Thanks to Diller and Scofido, even riding the elevator should be fun. Determined to take full advantage of the museum’s waterfront site, the architects designed a special 140-square-foot glass-walled elevator. As the elevator rises through the museum, different views of the harbor speed past like the frames of a film.
As dramatic as it is during the day, the ICA makes an even stronger impression at night. That’s when the building’s exterior walls seem to fade away, an effect heightened by the large expanses of clear glass on the museum’s lower floors. The top floor, meanwhile, is sheathed in vertical bands of channel glass — a material that produces a soft, lantern-like glow at night.
Together, the contrast between the bright, clear light emanating from the lower floors and the soft, translucent glow emitted by the top floor creates a striking effect.
Though it may never achieve the instant-icon status of Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, the new ICA is a welcome addition to Boston’s — and New England’s — cultural scene. Indeed, it may become the template for a new kind of museum, one just as comfortable with bytes and pixels as it is with paintings and sculptures.
The Institute of Contemporary Art is at 100 Northern Ave., Boston. From Providence, take Route 95 north to Route 93. In Boston, take Exit 18. At the second traffic signal take a right onto the South Boston Bypass Road. Take a left at the second signal (a flashing yellow signal) onto West Service Road, which takes you to Congress Street. Cross Congress Street and then take a right onto Seaport Boulevard. At the first light, take a left onto Northern Avenue. The ICA is immediately on your right.The museum is celebrating its grand opening today with an open house from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Regular hours are Tuesday-Wednesdat 10-5, Thursday 10-9 and Saturday-Sunday 10-5. Admission: $12 general admission, $10 for students with I.D., age 17 and under free. Call (617) 478-3100 or visit www.icaboston.org.
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