ICA | 100 Northern Ave | Waterfront

It's not that i'm not accepting of new architecture, or that I only prefer a light pink brick facade, but the ICA is ugly objectively and subjectively.
 
I agree with you, but having experienced the interior, I like the building. Until architects learn there are other options than blank metal panels or precast brick slabs, this will be as good as it gets.
 
kz1000ps said:
I agree with you, but having experienced the interior, I like the building. Until architects learn there are other options than blank metal panels or precast brick slabs, this will be as good as it gets.
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You don't have to like art.

I'm not sure I especially like this building, but at least it's the first example of the art of architecture built in Boston in a while; the other two recent instances are both across the river at MIT. Not sure I like those much either, but at least they're art too. So they all deserve the respect and attention Campbell gives this one. And you don't have to like it any more than you like, say, e.e. cummings.

I also didn't much like A Clockwork Orange, but it's also art. Most folks on this forum don't like City Hall, which is also art.

The French, who have a knack for precise terms would classify recent Boston eye candy as art decoratif. An example is 111 Huntington.
 
Boston Globe said:
Architectural college buys ICA's old building

By David Abel, Globe Staff | January 4, 2007

The Boston Architectural College announced yesterday that it has acquired the former home of the Institute of Contemporary Art.

The renovated, 25,423-square-foot building, at 955 Boylston St., is adjacent to the college's main campus on Newbury Street, officials said.

The college will help pay for the building through a $12.4 million tax-exempt bond issued by MassDevelopment, the state's finance and development authority. The sale price was not disclosed.

The college will start planning how to use the space this spring, officials said. The school's president, Ted Landsmark, said the community will be included.

"This is a significant permanent addition to our campus," Landsmark said.

"As we envision how environmental and human design will be addressed in the 21st century," he added, "955 Boylston Street will enable us to better serve our students in architecture, interior design, landscape and design studies, and the public."

The building was designed in 1886 in Richardson Romanesque Revival style, as the first combined fire and police station in Boston, college officials said. The police station was later converted into art galleries before it became home to the Institute of Contemporary Art, which recently moved to the waterfront. The college has more than 1,000 students.
? Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
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I checked out the new ICA last weekend and was pleasantly surprised...though I felt it would be (and should be) about twice as large. Innovative architecture, in Boston! And not a risible target like Holl's sponge or the Stata Center, either.

It was also a pleasant surprise to go somewhere in this city and see something of a contemporary art crowd. Boston doesn't really have an artist/hipster neighborhood but the museum seemed to bring out many people who would live in one. To put it another way, it felt somewhat like New York or London inside, which was refreshing for a city often dressed in the homogenous, conservative, provincial hues of khakhi and brick.
 
czsz said:
Boston doesn't really have an artist/hipster neighborhood but the museum seemed to bring out many people who would live in one.
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Ummmmmm, Have you ever been to Jamaica Plain, or most of Cambridge and Somerville? There are also small enclaves in the South End, South Boston (not far from the ICA), the Fenway and Roxbury...
 
Even if you hate the name, I'd suggest a visit to "SoWa" (South of Washington, in the South End). That's an artist/hipster district if there ever was one.
 
Everyone I know in the Boston art scene found the art at the ICA humdrum and certainly not "contemporary."
 
Neither Somerville nor Jamaica Plain really have the critical density of someplace like the Lower East Side or East Village, and Cambridge is only as dense in fairly conservative neighborhoods like Harvard Square. I guess one could include Central Square, but it honestly feels more like Berkeley to me than New York, and the presence of Gap and Starbucks isn't helping its case. Davis Square might be a candidate, if it weren't so, well, sleepy. The rest of Somerville has more of a working-class vibe. Jamaica Plain feels more like an upper middle class family neighborhood (or a lower middle class Hispanic one, depending on what part of Centre Street one is on). The South End enclaves feel more like parts of Manhattan's Chelsea with gallery row strips.

The point is, if I took anyone familiar with the Mission District in San Francisco or Magazine Street in New Orleans, the inner neighborhoods of East Berlin or the aforementioned neighborhoods in New York to Cambridge, Somerville, or Jamaica Plain and told them they were comparable, they would roll their eyes. There's something about worn brick or stone and the abundance of artistic graffiti, a certain classic bohemian romance, that Boston isn't really compatible with. The only neighborhoods in which this would work, perhaps, have already been gentrified to exhaustion, and the rest of the city, by which I mean the oceans of lumpy three-deckers and one-story commercial strips, seem incapable of expressing the aesthetic in any convincing way.

EDIT: I might make an exception for Allston...I think it has the potential to be this sort of place...perhaps if it were home to more MassArt and Berklee people than BC/BU students.
 
Sarah slams the ICA

From a review by Sarah Goldhagen in the New Republic on the exhibition comparing fashion design and contemporary architecture called "Skin+Bones" is this passage:

"Diller Scofidio + Renfro's recently opened Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston looks fantastic from the Boston harbor and from the computer-generated stills of it exhibited in "Skin + Bones." Given how conservative the architectural community is in Boston, it is an important accomplishment. Yet the actual building's entry sequence, the non-existent relationship of its structural theatrics to the shape of its interior spaces, its detailing, its spatial processions, and even its top-lit galleries are simply, grievously, awful."

For those of you who have been to the ICA (I have not yet) what do you think about this view?
 
Re: Sarah slams the ICA

JS38 said:
For those of you who have been to the ICA (I have not yet) what do you think about this view?
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That's harsh, but I tend to agree. I think it's a great building symbolically, but it fails in many important ways. I found myself getting very frustrated when I went.
 
czsz said:
Boston doesn't really have an artist/hipster neighborhood
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Thank God! I'm so sick of hipsters! The only thing worse than hipsters are the hipster ghettos.

I live between New York and Boston now. I can't believe how "groovy" New York has become. Unfortunately, it's only on the outside. New York is as gentrified as any other big city and three times as expensive. There's not a neighborhood in that city where a struggling artist can live. (unless you consider Philly a neighborhood of New York) At least Boston has a few neighborhoods left where you can find a decent two bedroom apartment for less than $1500.00 a month. Jamaica Plain and most of Dorchester are affordable, interesting neighborhoods where "hipsters" and old Boston natives and different cultures mix together. Oh, and let's not forget Somerville. In fact, Somerville is becoming dangerously close to anything as "hipster" as there is in NYC.

You can't even find those neighborhoods in most of Brooklyn anymore.

Rich hipsters. You can keep 'em in NYC and San Francisco.
 
Rich Hipsters = YUPies 2.0

What about Allston? It was pretty hipster infested when I still lived in Boston. Not as bad as Williamsburg, but then I don't know any place that bad.
 
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