As Harvard Art Museums Close For Expansion, A Preview Of What is Coming

Harvard’s Sackler Museum in Cambridge closes to the public at the end of tomorrow, June 1, as the university’s three art museums enter the home stretch of a renovation and construction project that began with the closing of Harvard’s Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums in June 2008.

As the scaffolding has been coming down from a new addition across the road at Broadway and Prescott Street, which Harvard Art Museums Director Thomas Lentz says is “scheduled to open sometime in late 2014,” the museum’s plans are coming into focus.

The project by Renzo Piano—the celebrated Italian architect who designed Paris’s post-modern Pompidou Centre in the 1970s and the 2012 expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston—preserves the exterior and iconic Italian Renaissance courtyard of the 1927 Fogg Art Museum, which has been protected with listing on the National Register of Historic Places since the 1980s. But much of the rest of the interior was torn down to add 40 percent additional gallery space.

Harvard declines to reveal the project’s cost, but the price tag has been estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $350 million.

“It’s going to be a much more light filled, transparent, dynamic space,” Lentz says. “You’ll actually be able to stand in the courtyard and look up and have oblique views into parts of the museum that were never visible before.”

When Lentz arrived to become director of the Harvard Art Museums in November 2003, plans to expand the museums—which include the Fogg, which holds European and American art; the 1903 Busch-Reisinger Museum of Germanic art; and the 1985 Arthur M. Sackler Museum, showcasing Asian, Indian, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and ancient European art—were already being discussed. A proposal for Piano to develop a new facility along the Charles River had stalled. So attention had turned back to Quincy Street.

“There was kind of a rough, schematic plan for the new museum,” Lentz says. “But we essentially stopped that and backed up and started anew. So it’s been a long process.”

“Our hope is this brand new building will bring back all the good memories of the old building, but at the same time it will clearly be a new building,” Lentz says. “What remains from the old building are the courtyard, the brick exterior walls of the old Fogg. Inside all the vaulted ceilings and the arcades around the courtyard, all those had to be demolished. Everything is new in that building—floors, elevators, staircases. It was wildly out of code compliance. People forget one of the main drivers behind this building project is that the old Fogg never had climate control. If you walked in there in July or August, there would be floor fans whirling away. So it was not a terribly inviting viewing experience.”

Looking inside

Piano’s new modernist design on Prescott Street is a counterpoint to the Fogg Museum’s familiar Harvard red brick exterior and, just down Quincy Street, the modernist concrete of Harvard’s Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier’s only building constructed in the United States.

Piano constructs a sort of giant shoebox, sided with Alaskan yellow cedar, set atop a recessed, glass-walled first floor, where a new, second public entrance is being added. The whole structure is crowned by a glass pyramid.

“Renzo, he constantly walks around the site,” Lentz says. “He just walks and circles and circles the building. One thing he said early on, ‘You know, this building looks like any other building on campus. Nothing says it’s an art museum apart from the fact that you have a sign outside that says it’s the art museum.’ You will, from the street on the Prescott Street side, actually be able to look in the [new] galleries. Again continuing that transparency theme.”

The Fogg’s iconic Italian Renaissance-style Calderwood Courtyard had featured colonnaded arcades on the first and second floor, topped by a third-floor wall dotted with windows. The design suggested being outside—the effect completed by a faux red tile roof running along the top of the third floor wall, and a glass ceiling above that, which let in sunlight from a skylight above.

Piano removes the third floor windows and wall. Instead, the plan seems to call for the old arcades to float within a modern shell, with balconies running around the third and fourth floor of the courtyard. The glass and steel pyramid on top lets in sunlight (it can be diffused to reduce heat and glare).

The new design puts building entrances on the east and west ends of the courtyard, and then allows visitors to walk its entire arcade, with galleries extending off from the corners. A stairway and three elevators for visitors, plus one elevator for moving art, stand off the Prescott Street end.

New galleries have been added to the middle floors. The third floor will now have three 1,000-square-foot “curricular galleries,” featuring works chosen by teachers and students related to courses, and a 5,000-square-foot temporary exhibitions gallery. A new 300-seat theater is being constructed in the lower level, which will replace the 280-seat theater at Sackler.

The Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums had offered 20,000 square feet of galleries, plus an additional 10,000 square feet in the Sackler. The new building is expected to offer 43,000 square feet of galleries. “Because of our increased space we will have more works on display,” Lentz says.

The new “glass lantern” or pyramid atop the building floods natural light into the building’s two upper floors. The fourth floor will offer supervised “study centers” where students, faculty and the general public can request drawings to ceramics be pulled from their collection for their personal viewing. The fourth and fifth floors will host conservation labs, which Harvard touts as “the oldest fine arts conservation treatment, research and training facility in the United States.”

All told the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger complex had 154,000 square feet of space. The project demolished 50,000 square feet, and added 100,000 square feet of new construction, so the new building will be 204,000 square feet, according to Harvard.

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