Architecture Getaway to Boston: Renzo Piano Links Past and Present at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Renzo Piano's addition includes a contemporary art exhibition space on the left and Calderwood Hall on the right at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

This getaway can be done in a day from Manhattan, but if you have time, I would recommend that you spend the night in Boston. Due to time constraints, I decided to jump on BoltBus to Boston last Saturday morning for a day excursion. I normally take the train to South Station, but I wanted to try Bolt this time. The bus was 20 minutes late for the 7:30am departure in front of the Tick Tock Diner on W. 34th St. at the corner of 8th Avenue. I was assigned boarding group C and the passengers crowded around the bus driver while he called out each group. We stopped for a break somewhere near Hartford and still managed to arrive at South Station in Boston on time four hours later.

Passageway from Piano's addition to "the palace," the original 1903 structure.

I took the T (subway) to the MFA stop and walked a couple of blocks to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The purpose of this brief trip was to experience the new addition to the Gardner's palace which opened in January, 2012 and was designed by Pritzer Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano. I had visited other Piano-designed museums, but was intrigued with how he was going to integrate a contemporary wing into the 1903 structure. Unfortunately the carriage house had to be demolished in order to create space for the addition, but I was impressed by the way that Piano kept his wing separate yet connected by a glass walkway to the original building. The passageway formed an umbilical cord from the present to the past or the past to the present, depending on your direction. The entrance to the museum is now through the Piano addition and so you enter the palace by passing through the enclosed path with the garden on either side of you. This feeling of being transported to another era was one of the most successful aspects of Piano's project at the Gardner. Piano created two striking and contrasting spaces within his addition. Calderwood Hall was built to continue the musical legacy of the Gardner. It replaced the Tapestry Room in the palace where concerts were formerly held. The other dramatic space in the new building was created for exhibitions of contemporary art. The wall of floor-to-ceiling windows in the main gallery was oriented to face the back side of the palace. Piano not only played off the contrast between past and present, but also between the concepts of enclosure and openness. The central space within the Venetian-inspired palace is the courtyard, which featured twenty-foot long nasturtium vines, a Spring tradition at the Gardner, at the time of my visit. Even though the skylight flooded the courtyard with light, the space exuded the feeling of a private world, an interior environment only visible from within the museum. In the Piano addition, Calderwood's enclosure echoed this concept in its design. Piano also contrasted Calderwood with the light-filled, open contemporary gallery, which was created to display the work of artists-in-residence. Two apartments for the artists are located in the front section of Piano's addition.

Side view of new entrance building with the greenhouse on the ground floor and apartments for artists-in-residence above.

If you need a bite to eat, then book a table at Cafe G on the ground floor of the Piano building. The Living Room on the same level was an attempt to create a space to rest, read and interact with a guest curator. There were only three other people in the area when I visited and I felt that it missed the mark in its purpose.
The one disaster in the building was the use of hideous green tiles in the bathrooms on the basement level. Do not go there.

Circulation in the Piano addition with glass passageway in the distance.

Before you leave the addition, walk up the broad stairway to a landing which will give you an elevated view directly above the glass passageway to the palace.
When I finished my visit to the Gardner, I walked around the perimeter of the museum. The dramatic slanted glass wall to the left of the new entrance was Piano's severe declaration of the new. While his creation updated the institution, it will never come close to the ineffable delight that I felt while viewing John Singer Sargent's El Jaleo, Whistler's Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach, Rembrandt's Self-Portrait, Aged 23 or Titian's Europa.


http://www.gardnermuseum.org