Paul's House Diary

There’s not a lot of new development in Boston these days. The business sector has bottomed out, leaving us with giant craters in the heart of downtown and a sea of parking lots over on the waterfront.

On the flip side, Boston’s many great cultural institutions are spending like gangbusters. Your tuition is helping to create the only new and interesting architecture in the city.

Over at Mass Art, they are throwing together a new dorm for their Huntington Ave campus that will serve as the focal point for anyone looking skyward walking through this stretch of Fenway/Longwood. It may be ugly as sin when all is said and done, especially considering that conspicuous window placement/sizing, but in it’s current skeletal form it’s shaping up to be a svelte little tower.

I got some shots of it from all angles – up close, far away, then really far away – and from all of them this thing leaves an impression. First BU extended the city skyline down to the B-line when they built their ritzy new dorm tower a couple years back near Pleasant St., and now another college is making it’s mark. This new dorm combined with Northeastern’s International Village down the street in a smaller, quainter way are extending the “high-spine” down to the “Avenue of the Arts.”

Besides colleges, the cities museums are the only other significant builders in town these days. The two best ones happen to be across the street from this tower, and both are practically doubling their spaces with modern new additions.

The MFA opened up their new Art of the America’s wing a few months back. I’ve checked it out a bunch of times, and as boring as the addition may be on the outside, it is a total success in terms of interior aesthetics and helping the once cramped MFA breathe.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is building it’s own series of ugly boxes to keep up, though I don’t really know why. The notoriously elegant palace was bequeathed to the public under the conditions that it never be modified, or Isabella Gardner will come back and haunt you or something. The reason for this is that the museum and the pieces inside are combined a masterpiece that needs no modification. The new addition is going to include a cafe, concert space, artist-in-residence space, some empty space too I’m assuming, which is all fine and dandy. But why they hired Renzo Piano – the go-to “starchitect” for snooty museums the world over – to dump two big, ugly green boxes in Ms. Gardner’s back yard I will never understand. It’s clearly not what she would’ve wanted, and I don’t think the museum really needs anything more. All that is worth seeing at the Gardner is inside the palace itself – what am I going to go see in the giant ugly shed out back? If anything, they could’ve just picked a better design. At least this one doesn’t compete with the beautiful palace it abuts.

Below is a small slide show from the day. Me and X had another city-wide bike ride before I went off to work on Friday and by getting lost in Brookline somehow found our way to the Fenway. My favorites are the pretty ones from the park when the sun came out. My least favorite is the picture of Mass Arts current building across the street from the new tower on Huntington. It’s the black thing that looks kind of like a space-ship; let’s hope they put this bad taste behind them.