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

There has been an abundance of speculation on the future of the ICA in its new home, not least in the form of anxious questions about Bostonians' willingness to embrace the provocative nature of much contemporary art. The ICA, founded in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art, has had a notoriously complicated history in relation to its founding mission of supporting the art of its time, a history brilliantly interrogated by former curator David Joselit's series of exhibitions held in the mid-1980s, collectively known as "Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston." The ICA's endemic ambivalence was seen as reflecting a broader cultural conservatism among the city's elites, and its former galleries on Boylston Street, squeezed into a late 19th-century fire and police station, seemed to mirror its marginalization; the 1975 renovation by the local postmodern architect Graham Gund hid the experimental work on display behind a mask of contextual reuse. We may miss the intimate scale and the central location, just down the road from Copley Square, of the old ICA, but DS R's building certainly does proclaim an entirely unequivocal embrace of the contemporary. And I, for one, doubt that the new ICA will have to wait long to find its audience; after all, contemporary art is big business these days, glamorous, fashionable, privileged.

It may sit amid desolate parking lots for now, but--the uncertain real-estate market willing--soon the ICA will be neighbors with a $1-billion project on Fan Pier that developer Joseph F. Fallon hopes to begin this summer. It will include a new hotel and a luxury condominium tower, adjacent to the ICA, by Hill Glazier Architects, and two large office buildings, one by BBG (Brennan Beer Gorman Architects, which designed an upscale hotel nearby) and the other by Elkus Manfredi Architects. I mention this projected development around DS R's building less to wonder at how this corporate construction might affect the architectural integrity of the ICA than to speculate in conclusion on how a comparatively small-scale and highly ambitious design, on land donated to the city by the previous owners of Fan Pier (the Pritzker family), might serve as a lure for capital--on how, in other words, even a building devoted to the critical exploration of visuality might itself contribute to post-industrial gentrification. Boston long turned its back on its harbor, precisely because this was a site of labor--unattractive, unappealing to the tourist gaze. We might ponder the social conditions that make a view like that from the Founders' Gallery possible, and reflect on how the harbor becomes accessible to that gaze at a particular historical moment when the signs of labor are evacuated from the visual landscape. DS R has certainly taken the best possible advantage of this historical dynamic, but whether they could reflect critically on it, in the affirmative built form of the museum, is another question. Even their Bildung has its limits. At the end of my visit I checked out of the hotel, climbed back in my car, and began the long drive home, the late afternoon sun low on the western horizon, almost blinding me.