ARCH 4960 Design Proposal

Gardner Museum Activision Design Portfolio

siming zhang arch 4960

organization overview

Isabella Stweart Gardner Museum

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a private art museum located near the southwest corner of the Back Bay Fens in Boston, Massachusetts. As it suggests, the museum is named after its founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was born in New York City, 1840 to a wealthy textile merchant family. At the age of 16, the Stewart family moved to Paris along with Isabella, she was enrolled in a school for American girls, where she met the members of another wealthy family, the Gardner family from Boston. As a result, she met and married John Lowell Gardner, one of the most eligible bachelors of Boston at the time, upon her return to the States. During their marriage, the Gardner couple traveled to Europe many times and started her collection of art, rare books, and manuscripts. After Isabella’s husband John’s sudden death of a stroke in 1898, she started to acquire land in the Back Bay Fens area and hired a local architect Willard T. Sears to design the museum from scratch.

The construction started in 1899 and took nearly two years to complete, then Isabella spent a year installing and decorate the interior, the museum officially opened on the first day of 1903.

public transportation diagram

design proposal

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pedestrian circulation paths

gallery

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