Fairey Days at Boston’s ICA

The spouse and I finally went down to the waterfront to see the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art), designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the edge of Boston Harbor. Incredibly, this is Boston’s first new museum building in almost 100 years, and not a moment too soon. We’ve always had museums aplenty, including the ICA in different quarters, but a prominent space for contemporary art was sorely needed.

In keeping with the city’s goals for this formerly blighted area, DS+R engaged with the harbor as a third and fourth wall, and oh, how marvelous their accomplishment. Outside, their explicit goal was to extend the “civic surface” of the boardwalk upward into a water-facing grandstand, then further upward indoors to form a hardwood, glass-walled theater.

Shepard Fairey’s graphic-art show was the perfect time to check this place out, as the crowd was large, young, and interested. We enjoyed Fairey’s work, more for the media than for the message, and were pleased to see the beginnings of a permanent ICA collection. My favorite exhibit was Ugo Rondinone’s “Clockwork for Oracles,” which fills the lobby with 52 colored, mirrored windowpanes (one for each week of the installation) backed by whitewashed Boston Globe pages.

No one in the queue seemed grumpy.

The galleries struck me as limited; I’m concerned that there might never be enough space to mount a full day’s worth of artwork. But nothing can describe the experience of bursting from a windowless top-floor gallery into what the architects call the “crossover gallery,” the double-high, building-wide swath of glass that makes a mural of the harbor itself.

I looked up Robert Campbell’s Globe review and was intrigued to learn that “originally this wall was to be made not of clear glass but of panels covered by a lenticular film, resulting in glass that is clear when looked through directly, but which gradually blurs at both sides.” Campbell argued,

The loss of this wall is the one distressing feature of the ICA. As board members and staffers came to the construction site, they were wowed by the view and insisted that the glass be clear. But what the architects had planned, brilliantly, was a way to convert the harbor view into one more work of art for the ICA collection.

I take his point, but I think DS+R managed the conversion nonetheless. I love the architects’ own description of their work with H2O:

A…passage through the building dispenses the visual context [of the harbor] in small doses. Upon entry, the view is compressed under the belly of the theater, then scanned by the glass elevator, used as a variable backdrop in the theater, denied entirely in the galleries, and revealed as a panorama at the crossover gallery. The digital media gallery suspended under the cantilever edits the context from view, leaving only the mesmerizing texture of water.

While gazing thus mesmerized, I couldn’t help thinking that if a similar museum had been built in New York, at least a portion of its spectacular aerie would have been given over to a high-end restaurant or VIP lounge. The ICA has a lovely cafe but no VIP space whatsoever, and the dawning knowledge that we, the patrons, were the VIPs was a treat.

If you’re interested, go to DS+R’s Web site (click on “cultural”) and check out the fly-through video. It’s the only way to get a sense of how all these indoor-outdoor interactions were conceived, especially in the fabulous “Mediatheque” media gallery.

There’s only one down side to the ICA’s intimacy with the harbor: its back side, which is what most people see as they approach. Not only does it look decidedly like the back of a building, thanks to a bunch of opaque service panels, but it’s foregrounded by two butt-ugly parking lots.

I’ll keep an open mind, since development of the whole area is a work in progress, but the approach needs work; in embracing the harbor, the museum seems to turn its back on the city. However, this is a quibble in a building that is pure revelation in this culturally rich, architecturally tentative town.