The Visionary

On December 10, opening day of the new Institute of Contemporary Art, nearly 8,000 visitors marched through an ingenious structure designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that features a dramatic cantilever suspended over steps that spill toward Boston Harbor. The person behind the first art museum to be built in Boston in nearly 100 years is ICA director Jill Medvedow, a 52-year-old woman whose sunny, unpretentious personality is upstaged by her steely determination and moxie.

By ushering the ICA into this South Boston building that is at once brazen and ethereal, Medvedow offers the city an exhilarating new viewpoint. We now have a vision for how the rest of the Fan Pier and waterfront development might take shape; let’s hope we’ll follow this lead with more innovative architecture. And with any luck, we will begin to see contemporary art as an important part of our city’s cultural pageant. The ICA offers us a new viewpoint quite literally, as well. Situated between the Moakley US Courthouse and Anthony’s Pier 4 restaurant, the building affords museumgoers – the ICA expects 200,000 visitors annually, up from, at most, 40,000 at its old digs on Boylston Street – a panoramic view of the harbor and the skyline. From its waterfront steps, we can actually see Boston as a maritime city.

The soon-to-be landmark is part of a booming national trend. As museum directors and mayors around the country have caught on to the idea that snazzy new buildings draw tourists and stimulate the creative economy, new museums and museum expansions are popping up faster than little red hotels on a Monopoly board. Nationally, at least 40 museums are being built or are undergoing expansion, many by big-name architects. In Boston alone, the Museum of Fine Arts is getting an addition designed by Foster + Partners, to be completed by 2010, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has tapped Renzo Piano for its addition (no opening date has been set). Both Lord Norman Foster and Renzo Piano are winners of the Pritzker Prize, essentially the Nobel Prize for architecture. Two other museum projects, by architectural heavy hitters Moshe Safdie and Associates and Studio Daniel Libeskind, are planned for the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

Yet the ICA stands apart, locally and nationally, for a few reasons. Although not unheard of, it is bold and unusual for a museum without a permanent collection to commission a new building. (In recent years, the institute has started a permanent collection through major gifts.) More significantly, it will be the first building in this country designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a much-buzzed-about but fairly untested New York-based firm. Already, the project has attracted attention in publications from Vogue to The Times of London. "Architourism" is big business these days, and visitors from around the world will likely bring their fat wallets to the ICA and the city. To offer a comparison, when Pritzker-winner Zaha Hadid completed a building for Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center in 2003 – the architect’s first major building in this country – the museum saw its attendance rise 85 percent between fiscal years 2002 and 2006.

The ICA plan seemed obvious to Medvedow, even if it looked like a pie-in-the-sky dream to others. In 1998, shortly after leaving the Gardner museum, where she had been deputy director for programs and curator of contemporary art, Medvedow landed at the ICA. She quickly persuaded trustees that the museum had outgrown its cramped space in a 19th-century former police station and set her sights on a new building. In 1999, Medvedow led the ICA’s successful fight to build on a sought-after parcel on Fan Pier. Then she launched an aggressive capital campaign, started an international search for architects, and began assembling the permanent collection – all at once, all while rearing two children with her husband, Richard Kazis, in Brookline. There have been obstacles. Medvedow and her board took the risk of breaking ground on the site after raising only 55 percent of the $62 million needed. And the public opening, originally scheduled for September 17, was postponed due to construction delays. But Medvedow was unflappable, stating, "In the long life of this building, this is a very insignificant and brief hiccup."

Her political savvy has served her well at the ICA helm. Medvedow’s father held several city-government positions in New Haven, and, growing up, she was swept up in his political battles every few years. When she got older, she helped run a few progressive political campaigns. "I learned about the basic mechanics of organizing and learned how to move an agenda," Medvedow says, adding that she absorbed "a sense of what it means to be part of the fabric of a community."

A true test for Medvedow and the ICA will be to produce exhibits and programming that live up to the new building. There are certainly museums, like the de Young Museum in San Francisco, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and completed in 2005, where the building outshines its contents. "We want to avoid this," says Medvedow. "We want to avoid a dichotomy of architecture and art. I believe we have created a building that is equally exciting as a great work of architecture as it is an absolutely magnificent setting for works of art."

Rachel Strutt is a Somerville-based freelance arts journalist. E-mail her at rachelstrutt@yahoo.com.