ICA Boston
(4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
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Location:
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100 Northern Avenue
Boston
MA 02210
USA
coordinates:
42.3526611 -71.0430069
Building names(s): ICA Boston / Institute of Contemporary Art Boston
Architect/Designer: Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Images: add an image <== click Here
Other Information:
Completion date: December 2006
Function:
website: www.icaboston.orgCost: $12
TIP: FREE for all from 5 to 9 pm every Thursday for Target Free Thursday Nights
Hours:
museum, water cafe & ica store at the holly mcgrath design center
Tue. / Wed. Sat. / Sun. 10 am – 5 pm
Thu. and Fri. 10 am – 9 pm
getting there:
Take the Red Line to South Station and transfer to the Silver Line Waterfront. The ICA is short walk from either World Trade Center or Courthouse station.
From World Trade Center Station:
Exit left onto Congress Street. Walk one block to the corner of B Street and turn right, crossing Congress Street. Follow B Street for one block. At the corner of B Street and Seaport Boulevard cross the street and turn left. At the next corner, turn right onto Northern Avenue. The ICA is on the right. You will pass the entrance to Anthony’s Pier 4 and two parking lots before coming to the driveway leading to the ICA entrance.
From Courthouse Station:
Exit the station onto Seaport Boulevard and follow it, walking away from downtown. Just before the first traffic light, there will be a pedestrian opening in the fence on your left-walk through it to the walkway that runs alongside the Chapel of Our Lady of Good Voyage. This will lead you to Northern Avenue. The ICA is across the street to the right at 100 Northern Avenue.
Last modified: 17 July, 2009 | Suggested By LT
FROM A DISTANCE the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston looks modest. A simple box on the harbor, in scale with the other (scant) buildings there, it eschews the sculptural iconicity that many art institutions have lately embraced. It is only when you round the austere edge of the building and see how its top floor cantilevers boldly over the boardwalk that you are struck not only by its physical presence–from the harbor it will indeed be a landmark, especially when aglow at night–but also by its architectural intelligence, for here the diagram of the design becomes immediately clear.
In effect the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro first opened the narrow path of the Boston HarborWalk into a broad platform of wooden planks, which they then stepped up to produce a public grandstand for outdoor performance. (1) This slope extends to the height of the first floor, which, faced with glass, contains the admissions, “art lab,” store, and cafe. On the harbor side the diagonal continues upward to describe the second and third floors, also faced in glass, where the education center, “digital studio,” offices, and theater are located (the last is the indoor continuation of the outdoor grandstand, and it fronts the harbor as well). Finally, the exhibition galleries are placed on the fourth level, which is mostly supported from above by trusses; its seventeen thousand square feet are thus column free and, so, amenable to curatorial transformation. With twelve-foot squares of polished concrete flooring and fifteen-foot ceilings with skylights and scrims, this neo-Miesian pavilion is also a luminous mediation of city, water, and sky (the corridor that juts out over the boardwalk provides an uninterrupted view of the harbor). Suspended beneath it, like the cockpit of an amphibious spaceship, is a media room, a wedge of broad steps and computer screens that drops down, vertiginously, to a long window that looks onto the water below. Here the loop of the building–the gradual rise out of the harbor, the elegant angles that define its volumes, and the abrupt return to the harbor–is complete.
for some nice photographs of details in the ICA go to http://www.boston.com