14 DIGS.NET
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1.18.2019
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L E G E N D S | H A R V A R D A R T M U S E U M S
A
mbition, some six years and a design by
Renzo Piano Building Workshop brought the
Harvard Art Museums to life. e enormous
project, created in collaboration with Boston-based
Payette architects, saw internationally esteemed
RPBW, headed by master architect Renzo Piano,
consolidate the three previously mentioned separate
museums—each with its own history, collection, and
identity—under one roof. Doing so took a great deal
of architectural reorganizing and, crucially, a design
sensitive and responsive to both the historic setting
and needs of a modern museum. On paper, this is a
paradoxical ask, but in person, one feels only fluidity:
the gracious and easy merging of spaces showcasing
carefully arranged objects that never once feel out of
place or time. Harvard Art Museums also combines the
Fogg Museum's protected Georgian Revival building
from the 1920s (all of its structural, mechanical and
technical aspects restored and upgraded) with a new
addition on its east side, and a rooftop structure meant
to serve as a bridge between past and present.
Given its home on the country's most venerable
Ivy League campus—one that has graduated no less
than eight American presidents—other such links
PHOTOGRAPH:
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COURTESY
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VANDERWARKER
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ZAK
JENSEN
are notable throughout the Harvard Art Museums.
e Fogg Museum, for example, which was built by
architectural firm Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and
Abbot in 1925, was conceived as a center of scholarship
and the first facility of its kind to combine teaching,
conservation and museum space. Harvard Art
Museums continues this tradition, with a conservation
lab, study centers, and galleries; the latter two spaces
were significantly expanded in service of this mission.
(As one glides from gallery to gallery, admiring the
approximately 250,000 objects from ancient times
to the present on view, they do so alongside art
history students taking copious notes and professors
pontificating about Post-Impressionists.) On the
top level, the institution's newer Lightbox Gallery
showcases the intersection of art and technology,
while on the lowest levels, the 294-seat auditorium is
one of the Museums' support spaces that was enlarged
and modernized.
All has been executed for accessibility—to art, for
art lovers and lessons. And yet Harvard… accessible?
Is this not paradox too? e very name evokes an air
of exclusivity, and yet, while the Museums' original
entrance still faces the campus on Quincey Street,
another for the public has been placed on Prescott
Street. After all, art, like history, is for where we are
now. All of us. harvardartmuseums.org
