Diametrically Opposing Approaches

Construction at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Can holistic curatorial stewardship be achieved in the 21st century museum design? Is there an opportunity for reflection? Let?EUR??,,????'?????<

Charles Birnbaum, the president of the Washington-based Cultural Landscape Foundation, recently weighed in on two Boston museum expansions--those of the "New" MFA and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The two projects, he argues, reflect diametrically opposing approaches to preserving a building's historic relationship with its surroundings.

The MFA gets a thumbs up, while the stewards of the Gardner museum earn a raspberry, the basis of comparison being how the respective plans treat the museums' relationship to the Back Bay Fens, part of Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace "the first urban greenway in the world and ... a potential World Heritage site, according to many landscape historians."

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Exterior view from The Fens Park, 1932.

The MFA understandably closed its Fenway entrance in the 1970s, because the park had fallen into disrepair. But it re-opened the entrance two years ago, as part of the expansion (orchestrated by the firm Foster and Partners). Birnbam applauds this decision, and the reasoning of the MFA's director, Malcolm Rogers, who has said he wants to "make the museum part of the park."

Contrast that approach to that of Renzo Piano, the architect in charge of the Gardner expansion. Isabella Stewart Gardner (the woman) knew Olmsted, she consulted with him when she was building her Brookline estate, and she chose a site adjoining his Back Bay Fens for her villa (which she named Fenway Court). Yet Piano has re-oriented the museum away from the park, closing the Fens-side entrance (except for special events).