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

Traveling up to the fourth floor, one enters the galleries, which provide 17,000 square feet of exhibition space divided into two wings on the western and eastern sides of the building. Free of interior columns thanks to those super-trusses, these are wonderfully open and flexible spaces, equipped with an adjustable skylight system that allows natural light to filter into the building while keeping the visitor from looking out. Here all attention is focused on the art, and in a welcome gesture the architecture retreats to the background. But linking west and east wings along the harbor side of the building is the so-called Founders' Gallery, a long narrow space whose entire northern face is glazed; one emerges from the close looking of the galleries and is suddenly confronted with a distant view, from the very edge of the cantilever, out over the water toward Jeffries Point and Logan International Airport across the bay. It is a stunning space, certainly not suited to the display of artworks, but essential for the overall conception of the building as a machine for looking.

It would have been an even more powerful space had DS R's original intention of placing a lenticular film over the glass been preserved, so that when one looked straight ahead the view was clear, while to either side it would appear blurred. This would have been in keeping both with the architects' long-term commitment to questioning modernist notions of transparency, and with their more specific concern in this project with refusing the increasingly spectacular nature of the contemporary museum experience. "The building is like a control valve--it turns the view on and off," Diller has been quoted as saying. "The big challenge has been not to submit to the touristic." But this has proved easier said than done: the decision to forgo the lenticular film was made after Boston's mayor visited the unfinished building and protested against obscuring the panoramic view. The day I visited, the driving snow provided me with something of a substitute, in any case: for long moments the view out would be obliterated by swirls of tiny flakes, only to open out again as the squall passed.

From its inception in the later 18th century, the modern museum has always been about a certain conception of what the German Enlightenment called Bildung, the pedagogical shaping of the ideal citizen-subject. Museums have provided a space for ocular Bildung, a training of the visual sense, while, traditionally, simultaneously imagining that sense to be transhistorical--simply a natural, unchangeable component of the human sensorium. Walking through the new ICA, I kept returning in my mind to Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Altes Museum, Berlin, of 1830, and more specifically to a famous engraving of the entry hall, which depicts gentlemanly visitors exercising their visual sensibilities: two men walk amiably together arm in arm, presumably deep in discussion of the art they have been viewing; what seems a father and son stand in awed admiration of a Neo-Classical canvas; nearby, a visitor peeks around a wall and out through the columned portico to the view of imperial Berlin beyond. In each instance we witness the training of a particularly Enlightenment conception of vision and taste--a conception whose influence stretched well into the 20th century. DS R is, in a sense, attempting to rethink that Bildung for the 21st century, asking, what does the exercise of vision entail today? How can museum architecture teach us about the parameters of our sense of sight in a world of rapid technological change, when we have become all too aware of the historical determinations of visuality? (In this, I should say, they are the inheritors of the last century's most experimental museum designs, of the ideas of El Lissitzky and Alexander Dorner.)