How they did it
They had to get the land. They had to get the money. And they had to stay true to their risky vision -- even if it meant building on an undeveloped waterfront site.
December 6, 2006
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE a get-to-know-you breakfast, a chance for the new director of the Institute of Contemporary Art to sit down with a powerful trustee. Before the coffee had even cooled at the Charles Hotel restaurant, Paul Buttenwieser stunned ICA head Jill Medvedow with his news.
Well-known for his cultural philanthropy, the Belmont psychiatrist had been on the ICA board for six years. As he saw it, life at the museum had become dismal. No money, no prestige, no art collection. I'm on the way out, he told her.
Caught off guard, Medvedow made her first important request as museum director.
Please, she asked. Could you give me a year?
He gave her eight. On Sunday, Buttenwieser's patience, and Medvedow's drive, will be rewarded as the ICA opens its $51 million home on the waterfront, the first new art museum in the city in nearly 100 years. The road has not been easy. To succeed, ICA leaders had to raise more money than ever in the institution's history, in a city historically dismissive of contemporary art. They faced battles with their neighbors, government regulators, and their own construction company. And with only weeks to spare, they had to delay their glitzy opening.
If they had failed, they would merely be fulfilling expectations, and remain a blip on the city's cultural radar.
"It's one thing for the Modern or the Whitney . . . to raise $60 million," says David Ross, the ICA's former director. "It's another for a small, cutting-edge institution like the ICA."
Building muscle
They said we couldn't do it.
The six words became Medvedow's mantra as she met with city officials, cajoled donors, or picked up a shovel to signal when the building broke ground.
The skeptics had a point. By the time Medvedow arrived in 1998, attendance, which had peaked in 1991 at more than 120,000 visitors, had fallen to fewer than 16,000 a year. The nomadic museum had moved 10 times since its founding in 1936. Its late-'90s home, a former police station on Boylston Street, was so small the museum had to close between shows. There wasn't enough room to move out borrowed works and keep visitors coming through.
The ICA also couldn't acquire art. Dependent on the largesse of wealthy collectors, museums recognize that a permanent collection serves as an important signal of status.
In the '80s and early '90s, under Ross, a director with a flair for attention-grabbing shows, the ICA drew crowds, particularly for a controversial exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photography. But by the mid-'90s, Ross had moved on. So had the ICA's buzz.
By hiring Medvedow, 52, a scrappy New Jersey transplant, the trustees took a calculated risk. She had started up galleries in Seattle, and the contemporary art program at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. But she had never run a museum.
In public, Medvedow, not quite 5-foot-2, came across as peppy, warm, eternally optimistic. Behind closed doors, she developed a reputation for being fearless, unyielding, even difficult. She wouldn't take no for an answer.
Yet no is what Medvedow got when she asked Sheryl Marshall, an art collector who made her money in venture capital, to join the ICA's board in 1998. Not giving up, she enlisted salon owner Mario Russo, a longtime trustee, who invited Marshall to a dinner at his Beacon Hill home.
All her reasons for not joining -- business and fasmily commitments, the seemingly overwhelming work that might go into repositioning the ICA -- seemed to evaporate as she stared at the massive Shelburne Thurber photograph of an empty apartment on Russo's wall.
"I just looked around and I just realized contemporary art was something I always loved, that he was right," said Marshall. "I was being foolish saying no."
Yet at her first ICA meeting, Marshall looked around, surprised.
"And I said, 'This is the first board I've been on that has no quote , unquote downtown white guys,' " Marshall said.
By that, she meant business leaders with clout -- the kinds of people who populated the boards of the city's cultural giants, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Her first recruits included Henrique de Campos Meirelles, then president of Bank of Boston, and Bob Davoli, president of Sigma Properties. Davoli led to Jean-Francois Formela, a senior partner at another venture capital firm, Atlas Venture.
The outspoken Marshall also helped recruit staff. In 2000, Medvedow sent Paul Bessire, who m she was trying to lure away from the Museum of Fine Arts, to visit Marshall at her office.
"I said, this is not the [expletive] MFA," Marshall remembers telling the ICA's future deputy director, who had managed the MFA's institutional fund - raising efforts. "This is a different crowd, and people were not going to be driving up with three generations of money to be the first ones to write checks for tens of millions of dollars.
"To me, this was all about the new Boston."
A 'free' piece of land
Ideas were easy to come by on Fan Pier, a 21-acre swath between Anthony's Pier 4 and the John Joseph Moakley Courthouse. For years, development proposals rolled into City Hall like trawlers on the harbor.
The question became who could actually pull off a project on this desolate section of the waterfront. For city planners, this was one of Boston's last, great, developable spaces. The idea needed to be bold.
Chicago's Pritzker family, which owned Fan Pier, had a plan. In 1999, they proposed creating the largest waterfront development in Boston's history. Hotels, condos, office towers. City leaders liked the idea -- with one caveat. As part of their approval, the Pritzkers had to give up a 3/4-acre sliver right on the water to a cultural site.
This was Parcel J.
Parcel J sat in the midst of a wasteland of parking lots, and a mile away from the South Station MBTA stop. Not exactly a prime spot for a new museum, particularly one without a built-in visitor base.
But for the ICA, the city's offer -- a free site! -- was hard to resist. Once the Pritzkers did their building, the ICA would be part of a thriving, new Boston neighborhood. The museum applied and, in November 1999, was selected.
The doubters did more than whisper.
The South Boston Design Advisory Committee, which included future US Representative Stephen F. Lynch, wrote to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, expressing "serious concerns over the viability of ICA's ability to be able to develop this site."
That didn't surprise Medvedow. A year earlier, at one of her own board meetings, she had heard similar doubts. Kenneth L. Freed, a local collector and ICA trustee, noted that the museum had already been advised that any new facility should be built near other attractions.
"I raised my hand and said, 'Isn't this a stand-alone site where there's nothing going on? Freed remembered telling Medvedow.
"She said, 'It's free.' I said, 'You get what you pay for.' "
Asking big
Barbara Lee knew she was on the hook. The ICA trustee, whose 1996 divorce from buyout king Thomas Lee left her with millions, had always been a museum booster, even before Medvedow's arrival.
As a trustee at the Gardner, Lee had worked with Medevow in the '90s, helping develop that museum's small contemporary art program. They were close enough that Lee had recused herself from the ICA director search in 1997. She didn't want others to think the fix was in.
As a philanthropist, Lee doesn't just hand over money. She has a philosophy. Get involved, see what's needed, and then step up. That's how it worked with the Gardner and the other institutions she had given to in the 1990s.
"I had gotten comfortable with giving a gift of a million dollars," Lee said.
Medvedow, though, made it clear that wouldn't be enough. She needed to change perceptions, to recast the ICA as a player. Early in 2000, the director cut to the point. She needed $5 million. "I said, 'Wow,' " remembered Lee. "I knew I wanted to make a leadership gift. I didn't expect it to be that number."
A few weeks later at a March ICA board meeting , Lee announced that she would give the money, no strings attached. The rest of the board, most of whom knew nothing about the request, began to applaud. Then they got out their checkbooks.
With the fund-raising rolling, Medvedow, eager to make a splash, turned the selection of an architect into a public drama. One Saturday in March 2001, the ICA held a design derby, a public presentation by four finalists in a packed Boston theater.
Two presentations stood out.
The surprise candidates, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio , were New Yorkers known as much as artists as architects. They had never built a museum.
Using a laptop, Diller talked of their approach to light, drawing laughs from the audience with a slide showing the translucent walls separating the men's and women's bathrooms in one project, a feature she described as a "privacy leak." Diller showed photographs of the duo's remarkable Blur pavilion -- a fogged-over platform built over a lake for the Swiss National Expo in 2002. She wondered, out loud, whether the new ICA could feature a floating art barge.
Then Peter Zumthor took the stage.
He was the favorite, the Zen master from Switzerland whose resume offered a series of minimalist masterpieces, many of which the ICA's leaders had visited.
He wore a red scarf. He spoke of his love of cigars and red wine. He brought only a few slides, and scoffed at the idea his work could be understood from afar. Then Zumthor launched into a short anecdote that may have cost him the ICA job.
He talked about a commission awarded in Berlin. Unlike the projects the ICA leaders had seen, it was never built. The budget had delayed construction.
"This was eight . . . damned years ago and for eight years these people wanted me to make compromises and compromises," Zumthor said angrily, his face growing red.
In the audience, several ICA trustees were rattled.
"He was brilliant but iconoclastic," remembered Vin Cipolla, president of the ICA's board . "When he said that about the budget of the Berlin project, that made us gasp."
Reveal and conceal
Diller, Scofidio , and Charles Renfro, the firm's third partner, were thrilled to get the commission in April 2001. But along with its outlying location, Parcel J posed another problem.
"The water," said Diller. "It's almost too tempting to make that the focus of the building."
The answer, the architects decided, would be to control the view. Reveal and conceal: That became their concept. Light would be let through ceiling panels that were incandescent, but not clear. Inside , a viewer could still tell if it was a sunny day. From the outside, especially at night, the building would glow.
Its most distinctive feature would be an 80-foot cantilever, an overhang housing the ICA's new galleries. Though the architects had played with suspended spaces -- the Blur pavilion being the most stunning example -- the cantilever would be the most dramatic embodiment of the concept to date.
Most of the cantilever would be filled with the major gallery spaces. But right at the front, running the full width of the building, would be a long, shallow gallery that revealed the most unfettered view of the harbor. To add a concealing element, the architects wanted to use lenticular film. That blurred the view to either side of a visitor, offering a clear shot only when one stared straight ahead. The view in this Founders' Gallery would follow the visitors like a moving frame.
Medvedow embraced the design. So did board members and architecture critics studying the blueprints. City officials, though, had concerns about a building without a red brick to its name.
"They would tell me it was ugly," Kairos Shen, director of planning at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, remembers hearing from city leaders and local developers. "I told them, 'Don't judge this right now. Let it grow on you.' "
Compromises, compromises
So much had changed since 1999, when the ICA scored the Fan Pier plot. The city was now swirling with projects, not just the Big Dig but a lengthy list of museum expansions, from the MFA and Gardner to the Children's and Science museums.
On Fan Pier, the news was not so good. The Pritzkers delayed groundbreaking on their planned new neighborhood. Then they bowed out completely and put the land up for sale. All the condos and shops and restaurants slated to flank the ICA were suddenly on permanent hold.
The ICA still had to move forward. Now the new museum would be an island on the waterfront.
The groundbreaking, on a clear-blue fall day in 2004, raised the spirits of the trustees. It also locked them into a timetable. From here on out, every road bump -- arguments with the New England Development Corporation, the waterfront neighbor that owned the land holding Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant; the near-collapse of the project's construction company, Macomber Builders -- threatened to derail the museum's momentum.
The architects had their own battle. As the gleaming building began to rise on Fan Pier, Mayor Thomas M. Menino took a walk through. He stood in the Founders' Gallery. Then he was told about the lenticular film.
"Why are you going to blur the view?" Menino said. "When people come here, it's going to blow their minds."
The ICA's building committee began to waver, despite protests from the architects.
"We were very disappointed," said Diller. "If we had one conflict with Jill it was about that. She was totally supportive while we were planning it, but what happened with the mayor happened with a lot of people given a tour. You see that vast view, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, it's pretty breathtaking. To me, it's just too much of a good thing."
A 'hiccup,' or worse?
Invitations to the opening-week parties were at the printers.
Yes, there were delays in construction. By the time the ICA closed its Boylston Street building this summer, the new building project had fallen behind schedule. Macomber couldn't get enough workers to the site; quietly, the ICA had hired Skanska USA Building Inc. to take over.
But the plan was firm: to open in September, with music and dance performances, and a week of parties.
The invitations never went out. At the very last minute, the ICA had to cancel its long-awaited opening. The building wouldn't be done in time.
Medvedow tried to downplay the delay. She described it as "an insignificant and brief hiccup." In reality, the postponement created a mess. Performers booked into the ICA's new theater for the fall had to scramble for alternative space, or shift to next year.
One night in late September, ICA project manager Mike Waters came to City Hall to ask the Boston Conservation Commission for more time to comply with certain regulations.
Vivien Li, a commission member and executive director of the Boston Harbor Association, began hammering away at Waters. Why couldn't people get to the Harborwalk, the public path on the edge of the ICA's site? It's a construction zone, he said.
Where was the ICA's snow removal plan? Don't have it yet, Waters admitted.
Li raised her voice. "There's a reason we need these things," she said. "It frankly is insulting."
Waters got the extension, but Li's inquisition left him frazzled.
"When will the ICA open?" she asked him at one point.
"I can't give you a date," he told her.
It was another month before Waters finally knew. With the window of possibility narrowing between the holidays, the ICA announced in October that it would open to the public on Dec. 10, with several days of parties and members' events preceding the launch.
The timing was awkward, considering the likely chill on the waterfront and with Art Basel Miami Beach, the country's more important contemporary art fair, in full swing that week. What mattered most, though, the ICA's leaders agreed, is that the museum would, in fact, open in 2006.
On a recent afternoon, Medvedow sat in her sun-splashed corner office with Susan Courte manche, a former Gardner museum colleague who in 2000 did a study on whether the ICA could raise the money to build a new home.
They talked about plans for after the building opened, including programs and a new endowment campaign.
There was a knock on the door. Chief curator Nicholas Baume peeked in and asked if Medvedow had a moment.
The trio headed upstairs to one of the galleries, which by now were filling up with the paintings, sculptures, and photographs that would make up the inaugural show , "Super Vision." Baume led Medvedow over to Josiah McElheny's piece, a series of glass jars in a case that, through the use of mirrors, seemed to replicate itself infinitely.
Four trustees had purchased the McElheny in Medvedow's honor. Nancy Tieken, had been on the search committee that selected her. The other donors -- Bridgitt Evans , Anthony Terrana, and James Pallotta, and their respective spouses -- were brought into the ICA over the last four years, as the institution refashioned itself to play in the city's cultural big leagues.
"Oh my God," Medvedow said, putting her hands on her cheeks. "This is so amazing."
Behind her, Courtemanche and Baume chatted about the piece. Medvedow wasn't listening. Finally, Courtemanche noticed her staring.
"Are you crying?" she asked.
Geoff Edgers can be reached at
gedgers@globe.com.For more on arts, visit boston.com/ae/theater_arts/exhibitionist.
