If any building sums up in steel and glass this city’s newfound feeling for its harbor, it is the new home of the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Rather than turning its back on the long-blighted waterway as this city did for decades, the museum celebrates the reborn harbor. The $51 million building perches on the edge of Fan Pier, south of downtown, with a long upper section pointed dramatically toward the water, like a diver frozen in midair.
Sheltering beneath that overhang are rows of bleachers where people can chat, think about the art they’ve just seen, or simply gaze at the blue water.
And in a stunning gallery on the fourth floor, a wall of windows lets visitors take in the panorama of the harbor and the Boston skyline, stretching from the Bunker Hill Monument and the steeple of the Old North Church (of “One if by land, two if by sea” fame during the American Revolution) across the harbor to Logan International Airport.
“It’s the most spectacular site in Boston,” said museum Director Jill Medvedow. She believes it is “the most perfect metaphor for linking past and present. The harbor seemed like an important metaphor for what we do.”
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The harbor’s past stretches back to the city’s early success as a colonial port and as the setting for the Boston Tea Party of 1773.
Its more recent past has been far less glorious. For decades, the harbor was a noxious stew, a watery dump for Boston’s sewage and industrial waste. Like Lake Erie in the 1960s, Boston Harbor was given up for dead.
But Lake Erie came back to life, and so has Boston Harbor. Its fate changed for the better in the 1990s when a sewage treatment plant opened to keep raw waste out of the harbor.
Appropriately, the new museum building represents a similar rebirth for the Institute of Contemporary Art. Although the institute was founded in 1936 and claims to have been the first museum in America devoted solely to contemporary art, it was little known in a city where the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum dominate the art museum landscape.
The institute’s previous home was an old police station, a forbidding place “designed to keep people out, and for 30 years, it did a very good job of that,” Medvedow said.
Since opening in December, the museum, which charges $12 admission, has racked up 260,000 visitors, or about five times the number of visitors that it saw at its old location in a similar time period.
The first new museum building to be constructed in Boston in 100 years, the ICA was designed by Diller Scofidio and Renfro, an avant-garde firm.
Inside, galleries display the museum’s recent acquisitions — as part of its move to the new building, it started a permanent collection — including “Karaoke Wrong Number,” a whimsical video piece by Boston artist Rachel Perry Welty in which she lip-synchs a seven-minute sequence of voice-mail messages.
“Design Life Now,” a traveling exhibit at the museum until Jan. 6, brings together the most innovative graphics, furniture, architecture and product designs of the last few years, from Apple’s iPod to the streamlined LifePort, a cooler-size device for transporting human kidneys made by Organ Recovery Systems of Des Plaines, Ill.
But, as a contemporary art museum, it also has a theater, a music studio and a “mediatheque” — a digital-age library.
“I think the boundaries between the different forms of visual arts, and between the visual arts and the performing arts, are increasingly blurred,” said Medvedow. “It’s an exciting time, especially as artists begin to work in digital media. It’s the most promising because it’s unknown.”
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Harbor hits
*USS Constitution or “Old Ironsides,” a warship almost as old as the document
*Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, which features a Civil War-era fort and historic lighthouses
*New England Aquarium, whose four-story ocean tank sits beside the real thing
Sources: National Park Service, U.S. Navy, N.E. Aquarium
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Tribune national correspondent Stevenson Swanson was recently on assignment in Boston.