BOSTONS ICA

Triumph in Beantown:

But elsewhere the main themes of the design come into sparkling focus. The first place that's clear to see is on the northern side of the museum, where it meets the water. A huge slab of the building, cantilevered 80 feet toward the water, hangs over a plaza below that is lined in a South American hardwood, Santa Maria, stained a blue-gray color. The plaza then curls up to line the underside of the cantilever, producing the feeling of a clubby interior space blown up to huge urban scale.A giant outdoor stair — a set of bleachers, really, with a view of the water instead of a football field — climbs up from the plaza and attaches itself to the side of the building. From there you can also see directly into the 325-seat theater, which is lined on two sides by glass.This surprising, shifting interplay between inside and out — and between transparent and opaque spaces — continues once you step inside. A short trip through the lobby takes you to an oversized elevator that rises through the center of the building. Wrapped entirely in glass, the elevator provides views of the architecture and the cityscape outside. It delivers you, in a few seconds, to the galleries, and makes their sense of complete enclosure all the more dramatic.Illuminated by skylights that capture northern light and filter it through translucent fabric panels, the galleries are windowless. The floors are polished concrete, the ceilings high, the walls pure white and rectilinear. Nearly all the art looks terrific. The success of the galleries is a sign that when it comes to showing art the architects are confident enough to tone down the bold engineering and the vibrant mixture of materials that define the rest of the building.The most memorable space in the museum — if also the most inanely named — is a small room, entered from the fourth floor, called the mediatheque. Suspended from the bottom of the cantilevered wing and tilted down in the direction of the water, the room offers several rows of computer terminals that visitors can use to look up information on the collection or about one of the exhibitions.