First Look: MFA Gets Foster-ed

Architizer News

First Look: MFA Gets Foster-ed

November 15, 2010

Photo: Lian Chikako Chang

Foster + Partners’ expansion to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, set to open to the public on November 20, features a new ‘Art of the Americas’ wing and a soaring enclosed courtyard with a scale to match this sprawling institution. The expansion adds 160,000 square feet at a cost of some $345 million, increasing the building’s square footage by 28% to house 53 new galleries, educational programs, a ‘New American Cafe,’ and two additional museum shops.

Featuring massive granite and limestone together with meticulously detailed expanses of glass, the addition achieves a gravitas appropriate to the existing building (a grandiose Beaux Arts affair) while also creating the lightness and openness desired by a contemporary cultural institution that is working hard to embrace its city.

At an urban scale, it is part of a wider project—shared by the city and by the Renzo Piano expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—to revitalize the Fenway neighborhood. Fenway Street, which runs between Fredrerick Law Olmsted’s Back Bay Fens and the museum’s north side, in particular, had become a deserted expanse during the nearly thirty years that the museum’s Fenway entrance sat closed. With the re-opening of this entrance and a re-landscaping of the building’s grounds, the museum aims to rejuvenate what should be one of the city’s more beautiful areas, making it friendlier and safer for pedestrians.

Photo: Lian Chikako Chang

At a press conference on Friday, Spencer de Grey, senior partner at Foster + Partners, described his goal as one of respecting the stately design of the original building. He described bringing the master plan of Guy Lowell, the Boston-based architect of the 1909 building “back into focus,” adding “I think you deviate from classical plans at your own risk.” The reserved modernist expression also responds directly to the positioning of the museum by its director, Malcolm Rogers, who explained, “We don’t want to be an ICA [Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, which shines with its daring Diller Scofidio + Renfro building]. We want to be encyclopedic at a time when contemporary art has never been more encyclopedic.”

Photo: Lian Chikako Chang

The new wing assumes this role with ease, reading as a modern pavilion from the outside, but as a smooth extension of the classical plan from the inside. The transition between the old building’s rotunda, with its classical dome, and the new wing is managed by a clean, white, and neutrally contemporary visitor’s center—a kind of palate cleansing—that opens onto the expansive and light-filled enclosed courtyard.

Photo: Lian Chikako Chang

The glass walls of the interior courtyard establish a minimal boundary with the exterior, allowing for an intimate connection to the surrounding strips of greenery and the protective embrace of the Beaux-Arts edifice. Light filters in from above through overhead scrims and fins.

Photo: Lian Chikako Chang

At the end of the courtyard stands the solid yet minimal limestone walls and floating granite stair that mark the entrance to the new wing. Opposite this modern wall stands the colonnaded façade that one passes through to enter the interior courtyard, and that reminds one that this space, now mercifully sheltered from Boston’s often-harsh weather, was once an outdoor garden and is still conceived of as such.

The galleries themselves are refined and muted, respectfully taking a supporting role to the art. Connecting the galleries are glass-enclosed corridors that offer light-filled views onto the city and the Fens. The whole thing is beautifully (and it seems, expensively) detailed, sensitive, and sensible. It is architecture for architects, but also a fine place for the museum’s visitors and the people of Boston.

If anything, however, the sense of ease with which the building seems to achieve its goals gives off a slightly surreal sense of anachronism: out of touch, perhaps, or simply aloof from the urgency of the economic, ecological, and political issues that our culture faces today. But then again, this is a building commissioned in 1999 and under construction since 2005, for a client that understands itself not as a manifesto, but an encyclopedia.