Boston's ICA: Giving Form to the Ethereal

Architectural theorists, conceptual artists, and intellectual bomb-throwers, take heart. Boston's new Institute of Contemporary Art, which opened Sunday, turns out to be a stunning validation for husband-and-wife design team Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio — a pair long known principally for such architectural subversions as creating a "structure" out of water vapor and programming a robot to drill holes in the walls at their own Whitney retrospective.

Here's New York Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff:

Designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro of New York, its taut glass-and-steel forms at the edge of Boston Harbor are a startling expression of public-spiritedness. Conceived as an extension of a 43-mile boardwalk along the water, its ability to interweave art and civic life makes it the most important building to rise here in a generation.

The new building "comments ingeniously on its own chief purpose," says Time's Richard Lacayo, "which is to foster the art of looking." (In Scofidio's words: "The building, for us, is a kind of viewing apparatus. It's a machine for seeing.")

That machinery is in high gear, says Lacayo, in the "aesthetic gamesmanship" of the Mediatheque:

Suspended at an angle from beneath the long, cantilevered upper story, the room culminates in a window wall that looks down directly onto the surface of Boston Harbor, roughly 40 feet below. The result is the kind of view you might get by looking down onto the surface of a pool through a diving mask: a horizonless sheet of water that fills the entire rectangle.

"That glimmering water wall is more than a spectacular variation on wallpaper," adds Lacayo. "It's an ingenious visual trick, an instantaneous conversion of nature to art by the mere act of framing the scene." That kind of alchemy is at work throughout Diller and Scofidio's creation — giving form to the ethereal and giving Boston a breath of fresh air.