Isabelle Stewart Gardner museum Basic information Date: 2010-2012 Architect: Renzo Piano Building Workshop in collaboration with Burt, Hill Location: Boston, Massachusetts USA
Background :
Entrance through green house
Opening in 2012, the $118 million steel, glass, and copper-clad expansion to Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by Renzo Piano Building Workshop will more than double the size of the current facility. Included in the project are a new entrance, music hall, gallery space, and other amenities for an institution that has remained largely unaltered since opening in 1903. Rather than radically alter the museum experience, the design is intended to augment what is already there. Piano’s new four-story building will host visitor services, now in cramped quarters in the palace; a new 300 seat music hall, allowing the Gardner to stop holding concerts in its delicate and often overcrowded tapestry room; a triple-height gallery for temporary exhibitions; as well as new lobby space, offices, and conservation facilities. A second, smaller structure with a sloping glass roof will house a greenhouse and apartments for artists-in-residence. In total the wing will add 70,000 square feet to the museum’s current 60,000 square feet.
Concept The building itself is drawn, not just in its representation but in its conceptual construction. The building seems drawn from its institutional context, a remix of existing social experience fragments mended together into a something new but uncannily familiar. New extension
Old building
Green house
Glass connection
Conclusion
59 The designer achieved the concept by making his space more connected to the social society by using glass transparency and the green spaces that form relief to the visitors