Boston news: Louise Nicholson visits the Institute of Contemporary Art, which is maintaining its tradition of support for the avant-garde, in both its architecture and its collection

Apollo, August, 2006 by Louise Nicholson

Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art re-opens in a purpose-built waterside home on 17 September. The city's first new museum building for almost a century, it charts fresh territory in architect, location and content.

While the Museum of Fine Arts continues its monumental $500 million renovation and enlargement by Foster and Partners ($337 million raised so far; visit www.mfa.org to see a five-minute film about it), and rumours abound that the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum is about to sign up favourite museum architect Renzo Piano for a major extension, the ICA has followed its founding mission of 1936: to recognise new potential. They chose Diller Scofidio Renfro of New York, who have built their first museum--indeed, their first completed building in the US.

The location is pioneering, too--and magnificent. Currently the building stands almost alone on Boston Harbour's forgotten yet centre-city Fan Pier waterfront, amid a sea of parked cars, 10 minutes walk from the nearest T-line underground station and at an address unknown to cab drivers.

Approaching visitors enjoy the full drama of the building's exterior: its side elevation is a giant Z-shape encased in glass. No opportunity to profit from its waterside location has been missed. At ground level, a boardwalk and grandstand of giant steps create an outdoor meeting place that connects with the museum's cafe and will eventually be part of a city waterfront walkway. Further up the Z's diagonal, an internal amphitheatre has such amazing views that one would be forgiven for losing focus on the stage. The top horizontal is cantilevered out over the water. It provides 18,000 square feet of column-free, top-lit gallery space, and from it hangs a small mediatheque.

As for content, the ICA's innovative vitality looks set to continue. It introduced the city to Picasso and Rauschenberg, and gave Kokoschka and Warhol their first museum shows. 'We have had 70 years of ground-breaking', says the director, Jill Medvedow, 'giving museum-quality shows to artists at critical moments, before they enter the museum canon'. For the opening, the lobby wall has a mural by Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima, and then a newly commissioned work every 18 months. The galleries have three temporary exhibitions as well as the kernel of the new permanent collection of late-20th- and 21st-century art, which includes works by Cornelia Parker and Nan Goldin.

'This is an opportunity to create important and contemporary architecture in keeping with our mission, and to commission and present contemporary artists and the art of our time', says Miss Medvedow. 'This is hard in Boston, and has not really been done since Isabella Stewart Gardner patronised John Singer Sargent.' Can the ICA also be the catalyst for a whole area, as Tate Modern has been for London's Southwark district? It deserves to be.

ARCHITECT'S VIEW The patron-architect relationship for Boston's new ICA building has been a happy one. Jill Medvedow explains the choice of Diller Scofidio Renfro. 'We visited their Swiss Expo temporary building. It was so conceptually original--on stilts, hovering above the lake. The structure was hundreds of nozzles that emitted spray according to the humidity, so on a humid day the whole building looked like a cloud. In all, it was about seeing the world in a different way to most of us, using architecture as an active shaper of social themes, not a passive reflection. It was truly original.' She believes they have again been 'truly original' for the ICA. And she's 'very pleased' to have used American architects. As for the assumed difficulty of raising funds for a building by inexperienced architects, 'we have turned that one on its head!': they raised most of the money locally.

What drew the architects to this project? Charles Renfro quotes Vitruvius: 'He claimed architecture must have firmness, commodity and delight. We are interested in the delight part, that a building can lead you to experiences of the senses and the mind--but particularly the senses.' From a small practice established in 1979, there are now 30 architects working on, among many projects worldwide, New York's Lincoln Center and its High Line. 'This is our first museum. But we will do more. They are the public buildings of the highest order, scrutinised in a way other public buildings aren't. Museums are the churches of the 21st century.' The architects' dramatic cantilever design that puts the galleries in the air--the plot is 18,000 square feet and the museum wanted 18,000 square feet of gallery space--also 'aspires to be a piece of architecture that works within the city and on its spectacular waterfront site', says Mr Renfro.