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Boston, Massachusetts
I hear it's nice in the summer, some snow would be nice
Here’s some photographic evidence from my office’s christmas party/day trip to Boston, part of a successful quest to both see the brand new ICA building (see pictures below) and score some damn tasty fish and chips (from a local dive called the Sail Loft on Atlantic Avenue, highly recommended if you're in the area).
For anyone familiar with Boston, the ICA (Institute for Contemporary Art) used to be on Boylston Street right near the Prudential Center and was never all that appealing, but now thanks to a brand new waterfront location, a truly fun and well designed building (by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro) and a solid collection, the ICA has become reason enough by itself to visit Boston. From its heroic cantilevered galleries to its giant glass elevator to its killer mediatheque and wonderfully overthought details, the experience adds up to one of the better new buildings I have been to, definitely one of the best in Boston and possibly one of the best new buildings in the country. It needs to be seen to believed.
Inside the mediatheque, where stepped seating drops from the gallery level and focuses you on to a cropped view of the water part of the harbor. You need to be in this room to understand how damn cool it really is.
While the giant room sized glass elevator is definitely more fun, the stairs certainly try, with a freestanding vertical light located right down the middle.
There isn't all that much to the museum, but all that's there is well done enough to make you forget all you could otherwise be missing. Its top floor (the cantilevered one) consists of galleries and the drop down mediatheque, the next public floor down floor has a large glass walled theatre and the ground floor has a shop and cafe. I guess that's all you really need. This picture is at the harbor side face of the gallery level, where the strengths of the corridor pale to the view from the other side of it.
The ICA is probably a ten or fifteen minute walk from South Station, which is only a three and a half hour train ride from midtown Manhattan (or significantly shorter if you fly JetBlue like we did, round trip from JFK is sadly cheaper than the Acela). Plan your own office christmas party to Boston or just go on your own. It's worth the trouble.
Compare and contrast Diller, Scofidio + Renfro's ICA with Frank Gehry's surprisingly unsecured Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge. I'll start: one is cohesive, well organized, highly detailed and extremely inventive, the other is a Frank Gehry building.
Still in Cambridge, still at MIT, still on Vassar Street but still a world away, Steven Holl's Simmons Hall glows in the harsh late afternoon light.
The architecture continues (but the city changes) with four interior shots of the Yale British Art Museum in New Haven, Connecticut. Of all the times I had been to New Haven in the last few years (in reality, not that many) I had never actually gone in the museum before. Most of the lectures at Yale I attended were on a Monday (when the museum was closed), always leaving me on the outside looking in. After all that time (in reality, not all that much time) I finally got in, at least for a little while. The museum was slowly closing down as it prepared for the opening of a new temporary exhibit, but it did remain open just long enough for me to understand what all that fuss about the interior was always about.
