Education of the senses: Diller Scofidio + Renfro's splendid new home for the Boston ICA explores the relationship between culture and sight

Art in America, March, 2007 by Tom McDonough

It was a long and mostly quiet drive from my upstate New York home into Boston one recent December afternoon. Listening to Bach, the cruise control set, I could relax and look out through the windshield at the countryside passing by; almost like watching television, really, in its sense of near-disembodiment. After several hours I arrived in Boston and walked the few blocks from my hotel to the waterfront, where I reached the object of my curiosity: Boston's new Institute of Contemporary Art, a translucent glass building designed by Diller Scofidio Renfro and dramatically set at the edge of the water. In this early December twilight, it was already starting to glow, like some strange vision amid the banal landscape of parking lots and corporate towers. It was a sight as bracing as the cold wind blowing in off the bay, a wind that forced tears out of my eyes, blurring my sight and soon forcing me back indoors.

Designed in 2002 and under construction for the last two years, the ICA Boston--after much-publicized building delays--held the grand opening of its new $51-million home on Sunday, Dec. 10, just a few days after my visit. It would immediately be hailed by Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times as "the most important building to rise here in a generation" and as "a milestone" for the architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, who have until now been better known for their temporary structures, gallery installations and set designs than for permanent buildings. I could hardly argue with those assessments. With its folding ribbon form that rises up from the pier on which it stands, culminating in a breathtaking cantilever that projects out to the very edge of the water, the museum has an undoubtedly striking form. But it is more than that, more than a formal exercise in contemporary engineering: it is also a kind of machine for producing vision, a built education in the ways in which vision is mediated by technology, by architecture and even by history. And as such it is a great vindication of DS R's practice, one that should put to rest the doubts so vocally expressed by some critics at the time of their 2003 Whitney Museum exhibition. Accompanied by "Super Vision," an inaugural exhibition organized by chief curator Nicholas Baume that at times stunningly complements this highlighting of contemporary vision, the new ICA offers the visitor a rich experience of--a true immersion in--today's techniques of observation.

Early the next morning I made my way back over to the museum amid continued blustery weather, the wind now carrying in snow squalls that would temporarily shroud the skyscrapers of the financial district to the north. The new ICA stands at the end of Fan Pier, projected home to a multiuse real-estate project but now a wasteland of parking lots just beyond the line of hotels, conference center and corporate towers that ends at Northern Avenue. I picked my way around the parked cars, photographing the building from various angles, re-creating the views I had seen in DS R's digital renderings of the design. Although the most dramatic facade of the ICA faces the harbor, it is very much a building-in-the-round, conceived to be seen from all four sides--not least because what is now its back will one day face the upscale Fan Pier development. (DS R has cleverly masked the service entrance here with a vast sliding wall, modestly introducing a theme of flexibility and transformation that is carried throughout the design.)

One enters the building at a cutaway in the southwest corner and comes into a tall lobby space, brightly illuminated through transparent glazing along the north and west facades; the ceiling gradually slopes downward, leading you toward the admissions desk at the far end of the hall. In this lobby one also finds the "Art Wall," which confronts visitors with a monumental, anodyne mural by Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima; different artists will be commissioned on an annual basis to produce works for this site, hopefully to greater effect than this.

Adjacent to the admissions desk is the main circulation spine of the building, a spectacular glass elevator that rises up through all four levels of the museum. But to call it a glass elevator immediately conjures up the wrong image--this is no John Portman-inspired gondola ascending through an atrium space. Rather it recalls, in a public register, the "elevator room" built by Rem Koolhaas at the heart of his private Maison a Bordeaux in France (1998); here too, we are dealing with a means of vertical movement that works to continuously transform the architecture of the museum, reminding the visitor that this building is not so much composed of four discrete floor slabs layered one on top of the other, as in traditional construction, but of a single continuous ribbon weaving itself sinuously throughout the space. And the essentially 19th-century technology of the elevator's operating equipment, motor and cables are proudly on display, in what will soon appear a counterpoint to the building's otherwise insistent emphasis on contemporary digital technologies--a neat insistence at the opening of one's visit on the ways in which even our most dematerialized visions remain subtended by industrial-era structures. (Similarly, DS R allows the four massive trusses that support the cantilevered galleries at the top level to be glimpsed behind the translucent exterior walls.)