The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and it's newly erected addition is a place where old and new, traditional and modern, and history and the present collide simultaneously, juxtaposed and abrasive in a campus-like surrounding of the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The museum is tucked just beyond the bustle of Huntington Avenue along the Evans Way Park, adjacent to the Back Bay Pens Conservancy park, and sandwiched between a handful of colleges, universities, and other museums. Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, the new museum entrance to the Gardner was completed in 2012 and serves to alleviate the museums administrative and retail offerings from its historic building, Isabella Gardner’s original Fenway Court.
The museum’s addition bears no visual or emotional connection to its maternal host, the existing museum. The existing museum, a grand Venetian-style palazzo, was designed by Isabella Gardner herself to house her personal collection of art, architectural elements, furniture, textiles, music, and artifacts from different cultures and time periods from around the world. The building served not only as a museum, but also as Isabella’s private residence, and features a vast four-story interior green house and a grand flowing floor plan. Each room in Gardner’s original museum overlooks the lush garden greenhouse while displaying artifacts on literally every surface, including the ceiling. Each room is just as elaborate and extraordinary as the next. The museum has a distinct atmosphere that transcends you back in time and allows you to vicariously experience art and history the way Isabella Gardner intended. Isabella opened the doors of her collection to the public in 1903.
When you first approach the museum, your eye is drawn directly to the new addition, which acts as the museums main entrance. An industrialized modern rectangular mass with an oxidized copper and glass facade, Piano’s addition does not fair well with its historical atmosphere nor does it connect with the existing building. The patinated copper finish of the entry facade is reminiscent of the nearby famed Fenway Park and the exterior egresses that wrap the front and sides of the building resemble those used on Piano and Franchini’s Centre Pompidou in Paris, completed in 1971.
The addition was placed only a stones throw away from the back of the existing museum and connected only by a single glass breezeway through the museums courtyard. This design was heavily based on strict guidelines from Isabella’s will that required the museum and permanent collection to be unaltered. Piano addressed his design approach for the buildings location, describing that “the distance creates a dialogue between the two buildings, that is maybe too short and too long, but a nice distance and the right scale.” However, from the outside, an existing stone wall surrounds Fenway Court and its rear courtyard, hiding the breezeway from public view. This creates an illusion that the addition stands alone and is disconnected from the Gardner Museum’s long standing historical appeal. The addition appears to be encroaching toward the existing museum building and looks almost uncomfortably close, causing your eye to want to push the addition down farther away. If not for exterior signage at the main entry and the additions close proximity, one might assume that the addition is a building belonging to a different institution that it is the Gardner Museum’s neighbor.
The Gardner Museum gained its appeal and reputation for its unique history and approach to displaying its permanent collection but with the modernized new addition, the Gardner has lost a touch of its individuality. The addition has also sparked local and national controversy concerning the preservation of the museum’s historical and individual integrity in addition to remaining within the confines of Isabella’s will. Local Boston Globe Critic Sebastian Smee referred to the expansion as “the deliberately theatrical, disorienting experience Gardner contrived with her original building is not just being altered: It is being openly contradicted by a new ethos of transparency, orientation, and explanation.... One can no longer plunge into the experience of the museum without first being enticed by all the clean, new offerings of the new building.” It seems now, that the Gardner Museum, with it’s new face is just another museum.
No comments:
Post a Comment