Inside the new ICA

Boston has not historically been friendly to contemporary art - or contemporary architecture. But all that may change on Sept. 17 when the new Institute of Contemporary Art opens on the waterfront at Fan Pier. Maybe I'm just suffering the afterglow of a nice press event, but everyone in attendance at today's walkthrough seemed wowed by the daring design by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro. A giant cantilever, a glass-walled theater and intense interaction between indoors and out are the defining features. Yet the art will be in walled galleries with diffuse light where it is not upstaged by the harbor panorama. It's ingenious.

The galleries are on that top level, with a cantilever extending out to the waterline, actually beyond the museum's allowable footprint, architect Elizabeth Diller told our group on the walkaround. Museum officials negotiated a little trade with city officials, she said, allowing more public space on the ground level harborwalk in exchange for the right to overhang it. The galleries up there are walled in, except for the long, narrow Founders' Gallery across the harbor side of the cantilever, with floor to ceiling glass and a stunning water and city view. (That's Diller in the Founders' Gallery in the picture at right.) The one thing that seemed to occasion some grumbling among our group was when Diller said the designers are going to experiment with a special effect on the glass there, so the view would only be visible straight-on and sort of frosted out at any other angle. Bad idea. You don't mess with a view like that. Although if they could find a way to block the rather comic cameo appearance by Anthony's Pier 4 on the far right...

Otherwise this is a dramatic and smart building - impressive even in the bare-bones state in which we found it today. Supposedly ICA staff will move into offices there in July, but expect it to be white-knuckle time until September. I can hardly wait to see finished versions of some features. The 325-seat theater, has glass walls on the west and north sides, that will have available scrims and blackout curtains that can be used to blur or hide the view during performances. But the stage is simply a bare 30-x-50-foot area in front of the stairstepped seating arrangement. This space is going to be a double dare to dance and theater companies and perhaps musicians.

There's also the "Media Tech" pod, dropping down from the underside of the cantilever, a room that will have several stairstepped rows of Apple computers for research or electronic art. The space resembles the bridge of the Enterprise and is configured to focus on the angled glass window at the bottom - which is designed so you see nothing but water, no skyline, nothing. Pure zen. (My badly lit image, left.) Diller admitted with a laugh that trustees wondered if the "vertiginous" space might cause nausea. And, well, they may have a point. But few architects would have tried something this freaky on such a major commission, and few organizations in Boston would have gone for it. There's a real chance that this is the city's first great building of the 21st century.

(Many programming details were announced today, but they were already in Geoff Edgers' Globe story this morning. I'll try to link to other coverage of the new ICA as it goes online. There were also a couple of "This Old House" producers in our group; we'll see what they're up to.)

Technorati tags: ICA, arts, museums, architecture

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