ICA | 100 Northern Ave | Waterfront

[laramaro]

ICA Announces New Opening Date

The Institute of Contemporary Art Announces Opening Date, December 10, 2006
Capital Campaign Exceeds Goal, Raising an Unprecedented $65 Million
October 18, 2006

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) will open its new waterfront museum on Sunday, December 10, 2006, with a free, 12-hour community day. The celebration was rescheduled due to construction delays. The ICA also announced that gifts to the capital campaign have reached $65 million, surpassing the museum's fundraising goal of $62 million.

"As we approach our grand opening, we are enormously pleased to announce the tremendous success of the campaign and the unwavering support of our community," said Jill Medvedow, Director of the ICA. "Our new museum embodies all of our artistic, architectural, and civic aspirations, enabling us to connect contemporary art to the wider culture, create opportunities for artists, and teach and inspire our young people through the arts."

The ICA is the first art museum built in Boston in nearly 100 years and the only museum in the city devoted exclusively to exhibiting and acquiring contemporary art. It is also renowned architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro's first building in the United States.

The iconic new museum features a dramatic folding ribbon form and a cantilever that extends to the water's edge. The 65,000-square-foot building triples the exhibition space of the previous facility and enables the museum to feature exhibitions of a size and scope never before possible. The ICA will present up to four exhibitions at a time, including thematic and solo exhibitions, showcases for emerging artists, and the first permanent collection in the museum's 70-year history. A 325-seat theater and mediatheque enable the museum to expand its offerings in the performing arts, film, media, and technology.

On Grand Opening Sunday, visitors will be admitted free of charge from 9 am to 9 pm to tour the new building and view the inaugural exhibitions. Festivities will include family-oriented activities and live performances. The Grand Opening of the ICA is sponsored by Bank of America, John Hancock, and State Street Corporation. Grand Opening Sunday is presented by Target. (Seating for performances is limited; tickets are required. Tickets are free and are available on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of event at the admissions desk.)

Capital Campaign
In April 2000, the ICA Boston launched the most ambitious capital campaign in its history to build, endow, and program the new waterfront museum. The campaign has galvanized the Boston community from leading philanthropists to teens participating in ICA programs, from major corporations to family foundations. Lead gifts have come from longtime supporters as well as from new donors, greatly increasing the museum's base of support. Over 770 gifts were received from more than 20 states, including 22 gifts of more than $1 million.

ICA trustee Barbara Lee kicked off the campaign with a lead gift of $5 million from the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which donated a total of $6.75 million. "The ICA's donors have helped make history on the Boston waterfront," said Lee, Honorary Chair of the capital campaign, who led the fundraising effort with Co-Chairs Robert Davoli and Ellen Poss. "The leadership of our trustees?who generously contributed more than $33 million?and the support of art lovers and community leaders in Boston and beyond have made this visionary project a reality."

Named spaces and programs at the ICA include: Bank of America Art Lab; Putnam Investments Plaza; State Street Corporation Lobby; Charles and Fran Rodgers Education Center; Paul and Phyllis Fireman Family Digital Studio; Glass Elevator, Gift of Anthony and Beth Terrana; Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater; Louis I. Kane Board Room; Poss Family Mediatheque; Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Gallery; Kim and Jim Pallotta Gallery; and John Hancock Teen Education Programs.

The ICA raised more than $7.5 million from the corporate community, including gifts from Bank of America, John Hancock Financial Services, Putnam Investments, and State Street Corporation, a 250-fold increase in corporate contributions since 2000. Foundation giving also was a key factor to the success of the campaign, with a $3 million anonymous gift and support from the Kresge Foundation, which made a $1.5 million challenge grant to the ICA to increase its donor base. Other significant gifts include grants from Jane's Trust, the Paul and Phyllis Fireman Foundation, Hunt Alternatives Fund, and The Lynch Foundation.

General Information
The Institute of Contemporary Art's new waterfront facility is located at 100 Northern Avenue in Boston. The museum will be open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 am ? 5 pm; Thursday and Friday, 10 am ? 9 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10 am ? 5 pm. Admission is $12 adults, $10 college students and seniors, and free for members and children 17 and under. Admission is also free for all visitors on Target Free Thursday Nights from 5 pm ? 9 pm. For more information, call 617-478-3100.

The ICA's official media sponsors are The Boston Globe, WHDH-TV, and WBUR-FM.

The ICA's official performing arts media sponsor is The Boston Phoenix.

From http://www.icaboston.org/Home/Information/PressReleases/New%20Press%20Release(20)

 

[statler]

New ICA to open Dec. 10

By Geoff Edgers, Globe Staff | October 18, 2006

After weeks of construction delays, the Institute of Contemporary Art will announce today that its new building will open to the public on Dec. 10. That puts the opening nearly three months later than originally planned, and on a waterfront where daytime temperatures usually hover in the low 40s.

Museum leaders had considered waiting longer, but said they felt they needed to open as soon as they could.

``You're never going to have total certainty," said Paul Buttenwieser , chairman of the ICA's board of trustees. ``But the public's been waiting, we've been waiting, and we're just raring to go."

The museum postponed the slated Sept. 17 public opening with only weeks to go, citing small but significant construction problems. The $51 million building will be the first new art museum in Boston in nearly a hundred years.

ICA director Jill Medvedow yesterday downplayed the delay as ``a very, very minor blip." But it has meant rescheduling performances planned for the ICA's new theater in October and November.

The ICA stressed that money was never an issue. In fact, today the museum is also going to announce that it has raised $65 million for the project, $3 million more than its original goal.

By pushing the opening into December, the ICA had little wiggle room as it worked to schedule a series of private parties and member events between Thanksgiving and Christmas. For the public, that left Dec. 10, the second Sunday in the month.

It also means the ICA will open to the public the weekend of Art Basel Miami Beach , among the country's most prestigious contemporary art fairs.

``This is definitely Plan B, maybe even Plan C at this point," former ICA director David Ross said yesterday. ``But you've got to get it open. They've got to start making some money. They've got shows to do and projects and commitments to other institutions."

Joseph Ketner , chief curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum and former director of Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum, said the new date would complicate scheduling for many art world luminaries who've had the Miami fair on their calendars for a while.

``I'm very excited for the opening, but this is awkward timing to piggyback onto Art Basel," he said . ``My plane tickets are for me to be in Miami through that weekend. So I'll need to check and see if I can change them."

ICA deputy director Paul Bessire said the museum would take advantage of the scheduling. Before the public opening, the ICA will host a series of parties in the new building early in December. Then the ICA will take a group of donors to Miami from Tuesday to Friday, returning in time for the Sunday shindig.

The new building, sitting on a prime waterfront lot on Fan Pier, marks a dramatic upgrade for the contemporary art museum, tripling its gallery space and allowing it to collect art for the first time.

World Music/CRASHarts , which has signed on to program events in the ICA's 325-seat theater, has spent much of the fall shifting performances to other dates, and other venues. In recent days, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence , originally set for five ICA shows in late November and early December, moved to the Cutler Majestic Theatre. The ICA agreed to shift Ten's the Limit, a showcase of local dancers, from mid-November to the spring.

``I'm not upset, I'm frustrated as anyone would be who has to call a ticket buyer and has to explain to them, `I'm sorry, it's not open,' " said Maure Aronson , executive director of World Music/CRASHarts. ``I am enormously relieved and looking forward to the opening."

ICA officials said they were pleased that they wouldn't have to reschedule any art exhibitions. The December festivities will largely stay the same, they said, though STREB, a New York dance company, will no longer perform at the opening.

Activities on the ICA's outdoor plaza will largely depend on the weather. The average high temperature for Sept. 17 is 72 degrees; for Dec. 10, it's 43.

``We were always going to have a tent," said Medvedow. ``Now, we're going to heat our tent."

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.

Link

Now that you guys brought it up, the mechanicals are really going to piss me off. :evil:

 

[statler]

A vision fulfilled at harbor's edge
Museum a frame on surroundings

By Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent | December 1, 2006

From cramped and awkward quarters in an old police station in the Back Bay, the new Institute of Contemporary Art has emerged into the light like a cave dweller into sunshine. When the museum opens next week, the public will see the most inventive, most interesting piece of local architecture since the Hancock Tower of a generation ago.

There are a lot of ways to describe the new ICA; that's part of its richness. One way is to talk about how it relates to its site. The site is in South Boston, at the edge of the harbor. With the possible exception of a lighthouse, there's probably never been a building more intensely involved with the sea. The ICA and the harbor enjoy the architectural equivalent of a dating relationship.

The ICA's architects, who are partners in the internationally recognized firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro of New York, play many games with the water. The museum's top floor, for example, which contains the main galleries, thrusts forward toward the harbor like a telescope. The floor hangs there without visible support, held by powerful steel trusses in the walls. The glass wall at the end is like a lens, and from there visitors can stand and look out across the water.

They will see skylines and islands, planes, lobster boats, pleasure craft, bridges, cars, and off to each side, even a few hardy pedestrians. They'll be voyeurs of the busy city.

Or take the small auditorium called the Mediatheque, which is mostly for kids and their laptops. This room slopes to frame a very different seascape. Its glass wall points downward, framing a view of nothing but waves. "It's like a screen," says Elizabeth Diller. "The mood of the water changes all the time." She thinks of the ICA as being, in part, a huge machine for collecting views of the world outside. By framing them in unexpected ways, the building makes them into art .

Diller and Ricardo Scofidio -- Charles Renfro is a more recent partner -- are a married couple who first became known for their art, not architecture. Their installations often commented ironically on pop culture. A famous one used models and photographs to investigate the many cultural meanings and myths embedded in "The American Lawn," just as they've done with the water here.

In 1999, they received the first MacArthur "genius" grant ever awarded to architects, a $375,000 windfall. The prize allowed the partners to devote more time to their architectural practice. Both are also professors of architecture, Diller at Princeton, Scofidio at Cooper Union.

When they were chosen in 2001 to design the new ICA, they had built very little. "We wanted someone who hadn't yet done a prominent building in the United States," says ICA director Jill Medvedow . "The ICA has a long tradition of supporting the work of emerging artists."

Many feared that the ICA would feel lonely and isolated on the mostly empty waterfront. That hasn't happened. The big simple shapes are bold enough to command the site. As Medvedow says, "This is a building with strong muscles and strong lines."

The architects are as good at details as they are at big ideas. Take the wood, for example. It's Santa Maria, a gray-brown hardwood from South America. Starting at water's edge as paving of the Harborwalk, the wood surface acts like a continuous wide carpet. It approaches the building, bending and stepping upward to become a kind of outdoor bleacher. It continues from there into the building, to become the floor of the ICA's 325-seat indoor theater, where films will be shown and live performances given. The wooden "carpet" then curls upward to become the rear wall of the theater, then curls again to become the ceiling , then continues outdoors as the underside of the gallery.

From outside, you can trace the path of the wood through the building as a brown folding ribbon on the facade. It works as a sort of brown wrapping paper, enclosing and defining the parts of the building that are public but are not gallery space.

The art galleries at the top of the building, by contrast, are enclosed in pale surfaces of stucco and translucent glass -- materials that speak of light. Where the lower parts of the building rise out of the ground, the galleries seem to have come down from the sun. The white interior walls are washed with light from north-pointing skylights. At night, the glass will glow, becoming a lantern floating in the air above the harbor.

The building is filled with similarly expressive ideas. The elevator, for example, is an entire room that moves from level to level, big enough to carry 50 people, with floor and ceiling like those of the rooms it opens onto.

As it rises, it offers a series of framed and varied views of the harbor through its glass wall. "It's like a sofa in front of a TV," says Diller. "The building is a visual tease, almost like porn. We wanted to distribute the view in small doses."

One aspect of that tease is missing. At the water end of the galleries is a space the ICA calls the Founders' Gallery, with that voyeur's view of harbor and city.

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.

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.

Today the view is terrific, but it is virtually the same as from any high-rise boardroom in Boston. It isn't art, and the ICA could have done better.

The ICA arrives as a sort of miracle. Its birth was plagued by problems. The proposed huge Fan Pier redevelopment, of which it was originally supposed to be part, collapsed years ago. The ICA went ahead bravely and alone.

Then it was dogged by construction problems. The general contractor, Macomber Builders, fell into disarray, partly the result of a disaster last April when scaffolding on a Macomber job fell on a Boston sidewalk and killed three people.

By the time of the accident, the ICA had already asked another builder, Skanska USA Building Inc., to take over management of the project. Meanwhile, construction costs were rising faster than they had in decades. (The ICA's final construction cost is about $41 million; $37 million was the projected cost when the design was first made public.)

The public opening, originally set for September, was delayed and is now scheduled for Dec. 10, though festivities for donors and art-world figures begin today. Even by the public opening, details and finishes may still be in progress. As is common with out-of-town architects, a local firm, Perry Dean Rogers Partners, has been working with the New Yorkers.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro admit they learned a lot from doing the ICA. The firm is now on a roll, though, partly thanks to this success. Other choice commissions have been streaming in. The most interesting, perhaps, is the renovation of the High Line in Manhattan, an abandoned elevated rail line that is to be turned into a 20-block-long aerial park.

The architects remember that Medvedow, way back at the beginning, told them she wanted "an important civic building." Medvedow herself recalls asking for "a civic destination, a modest - sized building with a lot of presence, a place that brought people down to the harbor."

They've more than achieved those goals.

Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.

Link

 

[kz1000ps]

NECN had a 4 minute piece on the architecture of the ICA during their noon-time newscast at 12:17. And since they repeat the newscast at least a couple more times, tune in at 1:17 or 2:17 to see it.

 

[palindrome]

One of the best projects in Boston in the last decade.

 

[aws129]

I can't wait to see this building in person!

 

[xec]

 

[bosdevelopment]

who was the ass hat that designed this piece of crap? I could eat shrooms and come up with something that looks better.

I'm in this area once every couple months and I can't help but constantly cringe at the monstrosity. I put it in the same category as city hall and is, imo
considerably uglier.

It looks like some hippie houses built in concord in the 70's around the decordova area. Doesn't blend in with its sorroundings whatsoever. Generally a horrid waste of an otherwise amazing parcel.

 

[aws129]

Are you joking?

This is shaping up to be the best building in Boston in decades. It takes spectacular advantage of its sight and will hopefully inspire surrounding developments to match its design quality.

Do you just not like contemporary architecture? Should it have been red brick?

 

[justin]

I put it in the same category as city hall and is,

That's his one statement I wholeheartedly agree with.

justin

 

[bosdevelopment]

My apologies for the sub par sentence structure and poor grammar. I've been out of it all day.


This building looks like a warehouse with tiny sails on the roof. Underneath the roof is a hanging 80's style RGB projector that you'd find on a transatlantic swissar flight circa 1991.

There's no symmetry or balance. The eye isn't drawn to any point on the building from any angle. The outside material looks like vinyl siding.

Once the new shine fades, it will undoubtedly be viewed as another civic disaster.

I don't know the slightest about architecture, but 9 joe blows out of 10 would look at this and tell you the same thing.

 

[statler]

Doesn't blend in with its sorroundings whatsoever.

It should look like a parking lot? :?:

 

[briv]

This building is getting tons of press. Its absolutely everywhere, and not just architecture mags either. There's a nice little spread on it in the current Time Magazine.

Id say the ICA has accomplished what they set out to do with this building--that being, to get everyone's attention. There's no question about it, the building will draw people, at least initially. We'll see if the art keeps them coming or scares them away.

 

[justin]

I expected so much of this building that I get a disproportionate sense of disappointment when I see the small blemishes that the actual execution puts on the brilliance of the conceptual design, like the mechanical superstructure, or those bizarre handles on the wall next to the bleachers. I guess that's what you get when from architectural theorists' first building:

"What do you mean, 'we have to put the fans somewhere'?!?"

I still love it, though.

justin

 

[statler]

the small blemishes that the actual execution puts on the brilliance of the conceptual design, like the mechanical superstructure

I think that's more than just a small blemish. Seems more like a major mistake.

And I agree with Campbell that the decision to skip the lenticular film on the front window was a bad move but at least that is correctable.

 

[KentXie]

I have to agree with with BosDev on this building. It looks like a boxy spaceship with it's entrance ramp open, ready to load cargo in it. This is probably one of the most overated buildings in Boston. I like contemporary design but this building is no where close to awe inspiring. Someone posted a picture comparing it to a shipping crane awhile back. I expected something much better.

 

[Mike]

I hope Fallon doesn't surround that gem with more of his crap.

 

[lexicon506]

If there was a way to just cut off all that crap on the roof, I would absolutely love the building. As it is now I still like it, but those clunky mechanicals take away so much from the building itself.

 

[ablarc]

If there was a way to just cut off all that crap on the roof, I would absolutely love the building. As it is now I still like it, but those clunky mechanicals take away so much from the building itself.

Amateur architects.

 

[xec]

The problem isn't that there's crap on the roof but that it's intentionally left in plain view. The architects probably subscribe to the same architectural aesthetic that considers the Chinatown garage on of the most beautiful buildings in Boston. The fix is simply to replace that dark transparent mesh with something opaque and lighter in color.