For decades, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has been one of America’s greatest small museums, and with the new expansion, it will nearly double in size. Along with exhibition space, the addition will house a new visitor services area with comfy chairs and reading tables (dubbed the “Living Room”) a conservation lab, music hall, green house, and classrooms for its educational programs. This bold expansion project has been no easy feat for the museum’s board, as Gardner left detailed directions as to how she envisaged her collection to be presented when she died nearly 100 years ago. But if there’s anyone up to the task of pleasing even the most fickle of parties, it the studio of Renzo Piano. Piano elegantly transformed New York’s Morgan Library and created a new masterpiece in Dallas with the Nasher Sculpture Center. There’s no reason hopes for Boston shouldn’t be sky-high.
With the Piano expansion at the Gardner, plus Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s ICA and the recent reopening of the I.M. Pei–designed Linde Wing for Contemporary art at the MFA, it looks like art in Boston is on the rise.
Through February 2012, timed tickets to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum must be purchased in advance at the front desk or online.
