Museum sees weeks-long construction delay
The Institute of Contemporary Art will announce today that construction delays have forced it to postpone next month's opening of its $51 million home on the South Boston waterfront.
Director Jill Medvedow said yesterday that the remaining work involved dozens of minor details, including such matters as floor finishes and the installation of lights, and not major construction problems.
But the decision has the ICA scrambling to reschedule programs, exhibitions, and parties once set to kick off Sept. 10. ICA officials would not give a new date for the opening, but said the delay would last ``weeks, not months," according to Steve Corkin, chairman of the building committee.
Medvedow made the decision to postpone on Wednesday, two days after she received a progress report from construction managers. She told the 36-member board of trustees of the decision yesterday in a noon conference call.
``Our building is beautiful, it's close to completion, and it works," Medvedow said in an interview. ``But you only get one chance to make a first impression. When we open, we are going to hit the ground running. In the long life of this building, this is a very insignificant and brief hiccup."
ICA trustees would not describe the work that remains. But they said that the stakes are high for the project, the first new museum in Boston in nearly a century and the first major project to be built in the United States by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro .
Slated until now to open to the public on Sept. 17 after a week of events for donors and civic leaders, the 62,000-square-foot building represents a dramatic upgrade from the ICA's cramped former space on Boylston Street. Defined by its glass exterior and an 80-foot cantilever stretching toward the ocean, the museum triples the ICA's gallery space and allows it to collect art for the first time.
``To me, it would be a shame to go this far with such a great building and an important building, and open a building that isn't perfect," said Nick Winton, an ICA trustee and a member the 12-person building committee.
Many of the high-profile design features -- the 166-square-foot glass elevator, the 325-seat theater -- would have been finished by Sept. 10, various building committee members said.
In interviews yesterday, ICA officials, architect Ricardo Scofidio, and construction company manager John Macomber said that the remaining work was not major. Among the pending tasks -- termed ``minutiae" by one ICA trustee -- was the need to test the building's ticket counter and climate control system.
``The feeling was, we can't postpone it much later than now," Paul Buttenwieser, chairman of the ICA board of trustees, said yesterday. ``If we're wrong now . . . all we have is a few weeks' delay. If we're wrong [later], we're in a lot of hot water."
The decision to postpone was not difficult, Winton said.
``The time difference between our planned opening and the [new] opening was short enough that we didn't feel it was that big a negative," he said. ``The biggest negative would be to open without being able to enjoy or really show off the building."
The ICA has been the lone bright spot of development on Fan Pier, a 21-acre parcel between the John Joseph Moakley US Courthouse and Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant.
Long owned by the Pritzker family of Chicago, the land has been used mostly for parking, though local developer Joseph F. Fallon, who recently purchased it, hopes to begin building a hotel, residential, and office buildings next year.
The ICA, founded in 1936 and nearly bankrupt at times during the mid-1990s, has been able to raise more than $60 million for the museum project. Over the last five years, its membership has increased from fewer than 500 to 2,500.
The opening week was to have included special donor galas, member previews, and the Sept. 17 grand opening to the public. ICA officials said all those events would be rescheduled once the opening date is announced. The same exhibitions planned for September will open later in the fall.
In addition, performances scheduled for the theater this fall will also take place on the new schedule. ICA officials said the new opening week would include an additional evening gathering to accommodate the greater number of people joining as members.
``We're lucky that the invitations for a lot of the events hadn't gone to print," said Barbara Lee, a trustee and member of the building committee. ``It's really no big deal. Anybody who has ever renovated a bathroom or a kitchen knows that things take longer than were expected. It's definitely a disappointment that we're not opening exactly on time. But we're still going to be pretty close here."
ICA board members said that they began to sense a potential problem with the schedule as early as last year.
In October, the ICA hired an owner's representative to oversee the work being done by Macomber. The ICA replaced Seamus Henchy & Associates, a New York company, with Skanska USA Building Inc., which had employees based in Boston.
Late Monday afternoon, Skanska delivered its progress report to Medvedow, a ``punch list" that she said made her realize the ICA might need to delay its opening.
In interviews, Medvedow and members of the building committee said that they didn't hold Macomber responsible.
``Macomber, our architects, Skanska, and the ICA have worked together very cooperatively to get the building done," Corkin said.
The ICA isn't the first cultural institution to face a delay. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, for example, wasn't dedicated until 2003, a decade after its planned opening. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, in the midst of a massive expansion plan, has already moved the opening date of the project once, from 2007 to 2009.
``The long-term implications are zero," said former ICA director David Ross, who has also served as the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. ``In the short term, a lot of people are going to have to change their travel plans."
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com. 