The Harvard Art Museums: Three Museums in One Luminous Cloud of Culture and Scholarship

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 
March 5, 2019

A museum brazenly steals the show from it’s world class contents…

Wow…I stopped in my tracks. My feet were on the ground. I felt like I just walked into a transparent cumulous cloud.

That’s a likely universal reaction to a first timer’s foray into the Quincy Street entrance to the Harvard Art Museums. Every visitor I watched enter did the same thing – stood transfixed a few feet inside, eyes involuntarily trained upward, gazing to the glass vaulted ceiling five stories above.

A sunny day, blue sky looking like a freshly painted fresco visible through the pyramid of glass atop the five story structure, this moment is an affirmation of brilliant design. Rapture is not too strong a word to describe what I felt. When’s the last time you could say that upon entering a museum?

https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/about/mission

The Harvard Art Museums are what happens when an institution thinks big, has the dough to shoot for the stars, and hires rpbw architect Renzo Piano, whose bloodlines channel Leonardo de Vinci, to imagine the form and function of a museum of the 21st century. https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/about/history-and-the-three-museums

Beginning in 2008, the university closed the ancient Fogg Museum (1895) and the staid Busch-Reisinger Museum behind it and took a bold step that reinterpreted what a museum's purpose could be. For the next 6 years, a chunk of the block between Quincy Street and Prescott Street was a construction site; entire walls were removed, cranes resembling prehistoric birds hovered and built a glass nest three stories high high over the Fogg Museum. The 1991 building that had housed the Busch-Reisinger Museum, located right behind the Fogg, was demolished. The Quincy Street exterior facade remains untouched. The Prescott Street entrance looks as different as the two sides of a coin. The inside…well, it was reassembled with the inter-connectedness of a Rubik's cube.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/11/01/with-opening-expanded-harvard-art-museums-complex-patience-rewarded/DGhCKlNLxmBqwlvB3ZatMK/story.html

The Harvard Art Museums are the equivalent of a world-class teaching hospital. Its patients are historic artifacts and priceless art from a millennium or so. Its doctors are directors, curators, and faculty. Its interns are students and scholars from around the world who preserve and document and study the collection in their care.

Areas for study, preservation, scholarly work and teaching surround the atrium on the top three floors - all visible through glass doors with huge glass panes admitting from outside. On any given day, the space looks like an inside out beehive, students, scholars and conservators visible as they work in offices on the perimeter of the glorious atrium. The building has loads of 21st century green technology but none of it can match the generative smack of natural light that imbues the glass bubble with the sense that its floating in an architectural amniotic fluid filled with creative ions that charge the animate and inanimate forms inside.

The Harvard Art Museums (Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, Sackler) each have their own philosophies and guiding principles. Miraculously, they retain their identities, bonded together by the diffusion of natural light and visitor friendly flow design and signage.

One of my favorite museums, the Fogg fell off my radar when it closed in 2008. Eleven years later, I felt like Rip Van Winkle when I strolled inside after such a long hiatus. I came to the museum to see the Bauhaus Show that my architect friends and scholars wanted to see. The Bauhaus Show was mesmerizing but honest to goodness, in this first visit, the design and architecture of the Harvard Art Museums were the stars of the show.

Photos...

The original brick exterior structure of The Fogg Museum remains intact. The glass pyramid centered across the top of the structure is visible in the first photograph.

Toggle through the photos...

Harvard Museums Quincy Street Entrance

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Natural Light controlled by shades, blinds

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The blinds and shades are in a constant state of flux according to the needs of the researchers, students, scholars in the offices that surround the atrium on the third and fourth floors.

Luminous multi-purpose interior

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Harvard Art Museums Prescott Street Entrance

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The old Busch-Reisinger Museum was demolished and replaced by the addition to the museum with an entrance on Prescott Street. Note the brick exterior to the Fogg Museum behind the newer cement and steel addition.

No detail left without natural light, even the Gift Shop...

Harvard Art Museums Gift Shop

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Terrific guide to help plan your visit...

Visit the tiny Jenny's Cafe, eat in a  cozy seating area or saunter out find a table in the original atrium under the pyramid of glass five stories above.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Comments

[Kristen Eichleay]

Thank you, Paul, for your always insightful review. I haven’t been there yet - no excuse, I live in Cambridge - but now I’m intrigued.
I needed the nudge

[Myke Farricker]

Makes me want to go with Carol - thanks!

[Christopher Huggins]

Thanks for raising our awareness of yet another resource in our midsts. Yesterday my daughter in law took my 3 year old grandson to Harvard's Museum of Natural History. He loved it! Have to put this museum on all of our lists.
Thanks for sharing!

[Nona Bock]

Fabulous photos! - I appreciated the update.

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. aka PT from Boston]

Kristen, you won't be disappointed. It's a great destination if you want to wow out of town visitors. It's a two-fer...architectural design and art.

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. aka PT from Boston]

Christopher,
The reasons may be different but I'll bet this space would impress audiences of kids as well as their parents - and grandparents!

[Susan M. Bennett]

So interesting PT. I will make an effort to get in to see the museums.it has been eons. Thanks for reintroducing them

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. aka PT from Boston]

Susan, no matter what the exhibit, you won’t be disappointed with the natural light infused design when you enter the wide open atrium. Let me know when you go.

[Susan M. Bennett]

Thanks, I will! Piano is a genius at bringing light into museums, although I am not a fan of his renovation of the Morgan in NY. The atrium there brings light but seems, in my opinion anyway, to try to do too many things and ruined a sweet cafe they had there by putting it in a cavernous noisy place. I guess compromises had to be made.