ROOF PARTY
When I visited the newly-renovated Harvard Art Museums (HAM), a woman stepping out of one of the galleries stopped and groaned, to no one in particular, “Wait, where am I? I can’t tell where I’ve already been and where I’m going." That’s because the new building isn’t concerned with shaping a coherent museum experience, or with housing artworks, but with the heroics of its own architecture.
The renovation, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, combines three smaller, older university art museums: the Fogg, the Bush-Reisinger, and the Sackler. Those structures sat quietly in the maze of one-way colonial-era streets around campus. The new building takes the gracious, colonnaded, three-story Romanesque courtyard of the Fogg, about the size of a basketball court, as its entry. It’s this space that visitors step into from the street, where they queue for tickets, and where they linger at cafe tables before leaving. A new floor of small galleries rings the atrium above, and, above that, two new floors of offices and classrooms. The heightened atrium is capped with a glass and steel pyramid that, in its grandeur, recalls I. M. Pei’s entrance pavilion to the Louvre.
Each of the small, square galleries is lit dimly, crammed with artworks, and offers only limited views to the streets outside. So one staggers from one back out into the atrium and then onto the next, never quite certain of where she’s headed. The glass roof is strangely charismatic, pulling attention up, away from the galleries. Thought it funnels sunlight into the atrium, most of the galleries remain in shadow.
It’s not the galleries, or even the atrium, but the glass pyramid that’s the heart of this building. It’s been finely and extravagantly detailed, with a web of white steel ribs, ties and struts supporting sloped glass panels, in a display of technical wizardry that’s become Piano’s signature. But when viewed from up close, on the balconies of the upper floors, the framing seems dense, much heavier that what’s required to support the glass. And when viewed from the atrium it obscures any view to the sky. The pyramid would be best observed from above, by a bird. It does little to serve the art, and art-lovers, below.
Photograph by Peter Vanderwarker, courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop.