Within a short space of time the Boston Museum of Fine Art has enriched the city’s culture with it new American Wing and now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum opens its new facility, two events that firmly reinforce the central role of Boston in the preservation and presentation of art in the United States.This latest architectural and artistic tour de force gives Mrs. Gardner’s gift to the people of Boston a new lease on life. The public grand opening will bring to fruition a project that has been a decade in the making.
The Gardner Museum Faces a Challenge and Change
Built in 1902 with the dual purposes of being a home to “Mrs. Jack” Gardner and as a museum for her extensive collection of Italian and European art, the Italian palazzo that Mrs. Gardner designed has been increasingly burdened by the growing demands on the museum, both in numbers of visitors and in the needs of programming. Live concerts, a program started by Mr. Gardner, were cramped and held in a room that she had designed as a gallery to show her collection of fine tapestries. An artist-in-residence program, which Mrs. Gardner inaugurated with John Singer Sargent, suffered from severe lack of space and had no gallery adequate to exhibit the artists’ work. Art programs for children and other visitors were condemned to tiny and inadequate spaces.
Renzo Piano and a Plan for the Future
The Museum’s Board of Directors realized that if it were to keep the museum relevant and active it had to address those shortcomings and to build a new building that would add capacity, but not detract from the original early-twentieth-century building and its mission. In seeking to do so they sought out Renzo Piano, one of the world’s leading contemporary architects. Piano is currently also involved in the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge and is also known in the US for his work on the expansion of the High Art Museum in Atlanta, the Resnick Pavilion and the California Academy of Sciences Building, both in Los Angeles.
The new Gardner facility employs lots of glass for its façade, providing bright and open spaces for greeting visitors. The sloping face of a triangular glass roof provides a new home for the greenhouse that keeps the palace’s flowers fresh. Behind it, much needed office space is suffused with natural light.
Behind the opening pavilion a four story structure encased in green patinated copper is the core of the new facilities. The copper carries through the sense of the copper on the palace’s own roof. On the ground level, visitors enter a hallway lined on one side with books. Off to the right the ”Living Room” is just that, a large room where visitors can browse, read, interact with docents or merely rest and contemplate the museum. Another touch of Isabella can be found here, a pair of cages with canaries like those that she was so fond of. Also on this floor is a large, bright and airy café, another facility sorely lacking in the old building.
Stairway to Art and Performance
A wide double stairway leads upward between those two rooms to the second floor and a new gallery and performance hall. The end wall of the gallery opens out in glass, from the floor to the ceiling almost forty feet above. This gallery is sized and built to handle every sort of exhibit from large contemporary installations to more intimate smaller showings. Its glass wall, which looks out onto the Boston skyline and the renaissance palace, has built-in shades that can control light even to darkness. Its high ceiling can be lowered to three different levels, creating differing levels of intimacy for exhibitions. An adjoining light-controlled room permits the viewing of books and documents (in lighted drawers) that were previously seen only under fabric covers.
The building’s crowning delight, however, is down the hall a few paces. Calderwood Hall, the new performance center, provides a unique small venue sure to bring a new sense of excitement to the region’s music lovers. Essentially a cube 40 feet on all sides, a central space is surrounded on all sides by double rows of chairs. For lectures and other uses this floor space can also be used for seating. Above, on all four sides an additional four levels of balcony rise above the performance level, each with a single row of seats. Each concert-goer has the sense of sitting in a box seat. Most exciting, the sound in this remarkable space is pure, clean and crisp – everywhere from the seats on the first level to those in the topmost tier.
Teaching and Conservation
There is more to this transformation, of course. A clear glass tunnel provides year-round access to the collections of the original museum, a clean and bright passage from the new to the joys of Renaissance art. The Tapestry Room, used for decades as a music performance space has been reclaimed and restored to the magnificence that Mrs. Gardner gave it when she originally created it. New office space has taken pressure off the old structure and bright modern spaces have been created for the children’s and public art programs. Importantly, the upper floors of the new wing are giving the art conservators space and facilities needed to preserve the heritage of the museum.
Public Opening of the Renzo Piano Addition January 19, 2012
The entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is now on Evans Way and is open from January 19 Wednesdays through Mondays 11-5 (until 9pm on Thursdays). Opening ceremonies will be held January 19, 2012. There will be three day of free admission January 19, 20 and 21 but timed admission tickets must be pre-arranged by calling (617) 278-5156, or (617) 566-1088 or by going online. The new Café G will take reservations (heavily suggested) during bank of America Community Opening Days.
Stillman Rogers - Travel is an important method of learning about the rest of the world and finding our own place in it. Exposure to other culture enriches ...
