These are exciting times for The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, with construction vehicles at work, steel beams on the rise and the museum's new addition beginning to take shape. This expansion project, which is already well under way and will add nearly 70,000 square feet of new space, marks the museum's most ambitious undertaking since it was originally constructed in the early 20th century. Once completed, it will represent a significant enhancement to one of Boston's most unique cultural icons.
The new building, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, along with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Burt Hill, will stand 50 feet away from the present, historic structure, which is located near the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It will be connected to the original structure by a single-storied, 75-foot glass walkway and will rise to just below the original building's height.
Its strikingly contemporary design will feature a sprawling, glass-walled ground floor surmounted by several three-story copper-clad "volumes" united by a central staircase. The addition will also feature a transparent greenhouse with a sloping roof that emerges from the central structure.
Overall, the new addition is meant to blend with the current building and its park-like surroundings while at the same time asserting its own architectural identity. It will become the home of many of the museum's activities, including entry, ticketing, musical performances and special exhibitions.
This, however, is no ordinary museum expansion campaign, because the Gardner is no ordinary museum. Created by the famously eccentric Boston millionaire Isabella Stewart Gardner in the early 20th century, the museum is one of the city's best-known landmarks. It features a world-renowned collection, which Gardner personally assembled and arranged in the Venetian-inspired palace she constructed. It has been popular for over a century, and its attendance has grown from roughly 2,000 per year when it was first opened to the public in 1903 to over 200,000 per year today.
This enormous flux, which would have likely exceeded Gardner's wildest dreams, reflects the continuing interest in the marvelous collection, though it has also represented a significant strain on the current structure. Thus, the planning for the expansion project has been long and careful, addressing both the preservation of the original building as well as its integration with a new structure.
According to Jim Labeck, Director of Operations and Project Director for the Expansion and Preservation Project at the Gardner, the current campaign is the result of nearly 10 years of preparation, representing the combination of a number of the museum's major goals. "The things that were focused on were the preservation of the historic building and the collection, and addressing the needs of visitors, relating to amenities and programming," Labeck said.
While the new addition will not house any of the museum's permanent collection — since Gardner's will stipulated that it not be moved after her death — improvements include removing essential visitor features, like ticketing, coat check, the gift shop and the café, from the historic structure and relocating them in the new addition. These changes will help to alleviate some of the strain on the original museum.
Labeck said that an important aspect of the project was to ensure that the new spaces reflected Gardner's original vision. "In the new building, there is no grand, monstrous lobby or atrium that you see a lot of times," Labeck said. "We felt like the proportions and the scale and the feeling and the character of the historic building were important enough that we didn't want to introduce anything that wasn't in keeping with that."
Labeck also said that the new building would not signal an overall change in the nature of the museum's visitor experience. "While there is a new building, one of the goals was never to greatly expand or increase visitorship in a way that there was some business plan driving the whole thing," he said. "It was really to build appropriate space for the programs."
Among the programming spaces that the new addition will provide are classrooms for youth groups and a new space for musical performances. Peggy Burchenal, curator of education and public programs at the Gardner and overseer of these and many of the museum's other activities, is excited about the possibilities of the new addition. "There's just so much more space to do what we already do in a much more professional way, and we can't wait to get into the new space," Burchenal said.
One of the new aspects of the addition will be an area called the Living Room, in which visitors will be given the chance to acquaint themselves with the Gardner's unique collection that is, as a result of its arrangement and notable lack of labeling, very different from many museums.
"Currently, when you enter the Gardner, you come into this rather dark entryway, and because it's so small … you're kind of thrown into the museum without an opportunity to really think about where you're going and why," Burchenal said. "For some people, that's really terrific, and for some people … they need a little more background in terms of what is this museum.
"What we're going to be able to do in the Living Room is to give people some basic introduction — the structure for their visit that will help them engage more fully and easily with Isabella Stewart Gardner's mission," she added.
Burchenal also said that the new space will allow the museum to expand its offerings, but that the museum's programs would "continue to focus on close encounters with works of art in the permanent collection — that will always be the centerpiece.
"The new building is not about a tremendous expansion in numbers," Burchenal said. "We are an intimate museum and are committed to keeping that feeling."
According to Labeck, construction is currently going well and is nearing its half-way mark. The museum expects to unveil the addition to the public at the beginning of 2012 and is in the preliminary stages of planning its opening celebrations and activities.
Not surprisingly, excitement is running high among the museum's staff members as they look forward to the completion of the next chapter of the Gardner's history. "The project, when done, will be a great addition to Boston's cultural scene," Labeck said. "In a way, the ultimate goal was to secure the future of the museum for the next 150 years, and I think that's really what it will do."
