Architect Renzo Piano’s $114 million expansion of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which opens to the public on January 19, is a handsome, bespoke modernist structure of steel, glass, wood, and green copper arranged in geometric lines and masses. It’s a surprisingly cozy, domestic-scaled building built for gazing outward (“The palace is constantly the object of desire,” Piano says) compared to the inward, contemplative energy of Gardner’s 1903 palace.
The addition’s new 300-seat concert hall and a special exhibition gallery are dashing. And they make the old building better too by freeing up space to showcase the core collection, particularly in the dramatically improved tapestry room.
It’s not perfect. From the outside, the addition, which sits behind the palace, could be mistaken for the mechanical building of one of the neighboring, generic school or medical campuses. And the corridor from the new building to the old begins muddled and dull. But the way it delivers you into the old palace, right beside the blossoming courtyard, is a revelation, that feels like Gardner’s old magic.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 the Fenway, Boston.
Previously:
March 5, 2009: Court oks Gardner expansion, demolition.
March 5, 2009: Court’s ruling on Gardner.
March 9, 2009: Gardner buildings slated for demolition.
July 7, 2009: Gardner carriage house RIP.
Feb. 4, 2010: The Gardner Museum addition.
All photos by The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. Pictured at top: Inside the corridor between Piano’s new wing and Gardner’s original palace.
The new entrance to the Gardner.
Gardner Director Anne Hawley with architect Renzo Piano.
Exterior, showing, from left, the new greenhouse, the new wing, and the original palace.
The floor of the concert hall in the new wing.
Renzo Piano sits in the top row of the new concert hall.
The new, three-story tall special exhibit gallery in the new wing with a view out to the palace.
The “living room” in the new wing.
Inside the greenhouse.
A bathroom in the new wing.
Stairs in the new wing frame the corridor between the buildings.
Looking down from the new wing onto the corridor linking the buildings.
The corridor ends with an improved entrance onto the palace’s courtyard.
Compare with Gardner’s original entrance passage into the palace and to the courtyard.
The dramatically renovated tapestry room in the palace, with space at the center free of chairs now that it no longer needs to also serve as a concert hall.
Restored Chinese loggia in the palace.
Renzo Piano in the “living room” in the new wing.