MFA to add underground gallery to expansion project

The Museum of Fine Arts announced yesterday that it will build an underground, 10,000-square-foot gallery as part of its massive expansion project. The new Graham Gund Gallery, which will sit under a new East Wing, will house major temporary exhibitions. The space, part of an expansion to be completed in 2009, isn't expected to add to the $180 million price tag.

The existing Gund gallery, named after the Cambridge architect and located in the museum's I. M. Pei-designed West Wing, is currently used for temporary exhibitions. It will be renamed and converted into a permanent home for contemporary art.

"We've always been looking for a way of getting more bang for our buck," said MFA director Malcolm Rogers. "The advantage of the location is that it takes our major exhibition space to the central spine of the museum, as we look to make the Huntington and Fenway entrances the main entrances."

The news came in a museum press briefing intended to allow Rogers to highlight the exhibitions planned for 2004 and the show featuring fashion designer Ralph Lauren's collection of antique automobiles in early 2005. The MFA is planning to break ground on its expansion next year. Rogers didn't say much about the museum's $425 million campaign -- $180 million for the building, $180 million to endow programs and staff, $65 million for operations and projects -- other than that fund-raising is going well and he will make announcements later in the year.

He did highlight one of the changes made since the design was introduced in early 2002.

The new East Wing, once designed to house the museum's Art of the Americas collection and contemporary art, will be focused entirely on the former. Rogers said Foster and Partners, the project's architects, had discussed the idea of building underground for more than a year. But they hadn't spoken publicly about their alterations to the original plan until yesterday. Rogers said the new space will work better than the existing gallery because it is square, compared with the Gund. The new space will also feature 15-foot ceilings, one foot higher than the Gund's. He compared it to the Linbury Galleries, a recently opened space in the Tate Britain. "It's a no-brainer," said Rogers. "[The current] Gund is narrow and makes circulation difficult. The new location is a square space and allows more flexibility." Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.