Befitting proper Boston, Renzo Piano’s $114 million expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is discreet. There are no grand sculptural forms that vault above the buildings neighboring the nearby Fenway, and at the entrance you’ll find a passageway in glass and copper that leads to the main attraction, the 1903 structure in the style of a Venetian palazzo where the museum’s founder wanted her art collection to hang unchanged in perpetuity.
So far, perpetuity has been more than a century. Not bad, by American standards.
Bold in its restraint, Piano’s new building in glass and bronze is not the tail wagging the dog. Design-wise, the logic of the Gardner expansion is that it leaves the centerpiece of the museum — that is, the museum itself — alone. Piano knows that the Gardner’s charm, and its essence, is its quirkiness as a Venetian-inspired structure built to contain and preserve objects from the cultures treasured by Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). By placing the expansion's now-necessary accoutrements in a building alongside the historic museum, he contributes to that preservation without overbuilding the branded streamlined airiness that has made Piano the go-to guy among museum architects in this country, and almost everywhere else. One critic has already compared the new building to a science laboratory, and the Gardner has wisely chosen to keep the lab activities away from the art on the walls.
(Preservation of the museum's treasures has been a sore point at the Gardner ever since the 1990 robbery in which thieves seized seven paintings, among them a Vermeer and a Rembrandt. Even with the capture of Boston mob fugitive Whitey Bulger, who had long been assumed to know the thieves’ identity, no new arrests have been made.)
At the newly fortified Gardner, an added element of the gentle Piano-ization alongside a uniquely charming art museum is music performance, also part of Signora Gardner’s cultural mission. Piano has created a jewel of a place for it. In a corner of his new addition is a four-story square wood-lined concert hall, with two rows of seats on every side of three balconies. Going vertically, Piano has multiplied his volume without sacrificing intimacy, acoustics, or visibility, echoing the courtyard at the core of the Gardner palazzo. There’s no mimicking of a particular historic space, yet the hall evokes the intimacy of theaters in some ancien regime. Its lineage could be Venetian, like the museum itself, or it could a Gardner reverie inspired by Venice.
For Piano, the special challenge takes him outside a familiar vocabulary — there are no long metallic lines, no studied transparency (although a skylight sits atop the concert hall), no obvious radiance.
Back in the palazzo, you take familiar steps toward familiar works of art. On the ground floor, "El Jaleo," John Singer Sargent’s shadowy 1882 vision of a gypsy dancer in a kinetic trance, is displayed under a stone arch in a cavern of a stone cloister. The Gardner location seems ideal for the scene that Sargent painted.
Two floors above, Titian’s "Rape of Europa" (1562) — the greatest painting in America, some say — holds its place on the wall to show Jupiter, disguised as a grinning bull in a garland of flowers, sweeping a maiden away.
The Gardner has ambitions to present contemporary shows among its temporary exhibitions, and to bring in contemporary artists for residences — a program that has been in practice for years.
There’s no doubt that the Gardner legacy is bending as the institution grows. If you compare the Gardner modernization to the Barnes Foundation’s clumsy transplant in Philadelphia — a comparison that Gardner director Anne Hawley often cites, without passing judgment — Signora Gardner is lying more peacefully in her grave than the collector Albert C. Barnes, whose will was overturned the name of building tourism in Philadelphia. Given the Barnes’s fate and what the Gardner makeover could have been, the Piano renovation is all the more welcome.
BLOUIN ARTINFO spoke to Renzo Piano about expanding a much-loved institution.
What was the greatest challenge of the Gardner project?
It’s probably that you are dealing with a building that is so beloved. I met people who could talk about going as a child, then going as a father, and then going as a grandfather. It’s a kind of institution that seemed to belong to the city. It’s a romantic idea, a Venetian palace in the middle of Boston, and the courtyard, which you know so well, is not just romantic. It’s extremely beautiful. When you have to deal with something like that, you are in trouble, because whatever you do, you may end up doing something that competes, or is wrong, out of scale, out of character. I call this the problem of having a big legacy. It’s not cultural, it’s affective — it’s about affection. Its not really practical, it’s not about money. You always have people trying to stop the job from happening, but the real problem was having a legacy like that to deal with.
In fact, our decision was not to compete at all. The decision was clear. The palace told a very interesting story one century ago. It was about beauty, it was about magic, it was about light, but it was somehow about introverted beauty, because the courtyard was inside, hidden from the city. What we have done here, instead of being introverted, is extroverted. We used a similar desire for lightness and transparency — instead of building inside, we’ve done it outside.
Were there elements of your design that you needed to persuade your client to accept?
Not really, although I can’t say that they just said “yes” to everything. You know that the will said that no work of art should leave the building. That’s why we made an umbilical chord — so that you can have a work of art move from the palace to the special exhibition space and then back, to sleep in the palace. I can’t remember who wanted to do what — in good teamwork, you always forget that. But, for example, when we wanted to do the concert hall in the beginning, I had to prove to the client that it was a good idea, because it’s quite a mad idea.
The verticality, with its intimacy, seems to extend the Gardner spirit, while it replicates the verticality of the original courtyard.
Yasuhita Toyota, the acoustician, is a very good guy. At the beginning, he kept saying that sound goes up, so it’s a kind of natural way to do this. Also, this is my third attempt to create a cubic space for sound, for music. The first one as 35 years ago here in Paris, with Pierre Boulez and John Cage and Luciano Berio, at the IRCAM [Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique]. That was also a cube, a bit bigger, but it was an attempt to play with sound. The second was Prometheus, for Luigi Nono, in a church [San Lorenzo] in Venice. It was a space like a ship, in wood, with people in the center, and we put the musicians around them. This is the third one. The advantage of this one is that it’s very compressed. The physical distance is compressed. I was listening to someone playing the flute the other evening, and you could hear the breathing. The can hear the sound of the instrument, the physical sound. If a singer is singing, you can hear the air going through the mouth. It’s a different sensation, coming from the fact that you are very close to the musician, and this is magic.
Generationally speaking, looking at institutions, we are looking at places where there is a perceived need to expand. At the Barnes Foundation, such a decision was made to move and replace a building that defined an institution, which many believe was the wrong decision. Did you submit a design for the Barnes?
No. I was called and asked, but no. I am not a museum architect, really. I don’t feel like one, in reality. You can’t do too many. Museums are very interesting places, so you have to put in a lot of energy. You cannot do one after the other. You have to metabolize each project. Speaking of generational expansion, I am working on another museum that is beloved, the Kimball in Fort Worth. There, like at the Gardner, it was not about growing or dying. When you make a palace like that in 1903 and you’re a lady like Isabella Gardner, you think about magic, you think about beauty and the fragility of beauty, so you do something that by nature is very fragile. And that fragility will survive maybe one century, but it will never survive two, three, four, five, or six centuries. This is something that people must understand. Museums are places of duration. They make works of art safe, forever. The Gardner was an endangered species, in a way. You couldn’t play music forever in its tapestry room, even if you could play for one century. You consume the tiles on the floor. The beauty of the palace is also its fragility.
So, making the addition wasn’t really making it bigger. It was releasing pressure on the palace, it was about providing a good instrument for playing music, it was about providing more space for education, it was about providing a room where you can show works of art in rotation. It was about more than growing, it was about making the place better, and saving it.
In Italy, you are standing on Estruscan and Roman culture, and on centuries and centuries of culture and history after those foundations. As an Italian, how you view an American attachment to an institution that’s barely a century old?
I feel very much a part of your country, including the fact that I have an office in New York, I live partially in New York from time to time, and I have a son who was born in the States. He tells me that I was born in the States. I have a great love for America. Especially the music — John Cage and Pierre Boulez proved that America was a place of freedom. I’m in love with all the writers of the Beat Generation, from Jack Kerouac to everybody else. But I also encounter in America a romantic kitsch interpretation of European culture — what we normally call Beaux Arts buildings. But there are a few miracles. For me, the Isabella Stewart Gardner courtyard is one of those miracles. This lady, she had money, but she also had desire — maybe an exaggerated desire — and she had taste, and she also had help from Bernard Berenson. She was able to make a miracle. In some way, the courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum escaped being kitsch. It’s sublime, because of the light, because of the beauty of the collection. In this case, the tragedy of kitsch didn’t happen.
The courtyard is romantic, it’s even sentimental, but it reaches the intensity of art. I can give you another example, on the site of the new art museums of Harvard, on which I am working now. In the middle of the Fogg there is a courtyard, a copy of the Montepulciano Palace. Again, that’s also well done. It’s an odd manipulation — very romantic, also very funny, because they took the façade of the palace and they repeated it four times to create the courtyard. If you tell this to Italian people, they will tell you, “That’s ridiculous.” But it was done so well, and the stone was selected from the right quarry. I know that, because we’re looking for that quarry, since we’re doing some repairs on the site. It was done with a kind of precision, a kind of adherence to the truth, to reality. It was not a stupid interpretation. It was done scientifically, and with love. I see these manifestations of romanticism in a different way. Sometimes it’s pure kitsch, and I know that. But sometimes, and I am thinking of these two examples, it was done very well.
Sometimes this romantic approach was done to express trustability at universities. In the States, very often, the style was Gothic or roman or Greek. The reproduction was done, not to make kitsch, but to express trustability. Trust me, I’m old, I’m historic. It’s a complex matter, not wrong or right. Of course, It’s wrong when it’s stupid. But the truth is that time makes things beautiful. And history makes things beautiful. At the Gardner, though, before judging from superiority you can say, “My God, this is great.”