What’s going on?  Our train stations look like shopping malls, and our art museums look like office lobbies.  The new glassy wing for American art at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, by the great English architect Norman Foster, which opened last year, is rendered in the kind of blandly handsome corporate architecture that’s become de rigeur for museums who want to tart themselves up a bit without committing to something as big, as bold, and as costly, as the Guggenheim Bilboa.  The addition, which consolidates the MFA’s considerable holdings of North American art, contains four stacked galleries connected with an open stair.  The stair hovers over an entrance hall that’s about the size and height of the main hall at Grand Central Station.  However banal the character of the architecture (and it’s banal), in the hall the MFA possess a space of considerable grandeur that’s flooded with natural light… and they’ve put a cafe in it.  Why don’t they use it as sculpture garden? Or a theater?  Or just leave it empty?

A friend who lives in the city says that she liked the old MFA better, where she had to wander through a mess of old, small galleries to find particular artworks.  After I’d gotten my fill of the American wing, with its astounding John Singleton Copley and John Singer Sargent collections, I wandered through the old wings stuffed with Greco-Roman, Asian, African and Oceanic art.  These parts of the museum, with their humming fluorescent lights, groaning mechanical fans, and stodgy, linen-lined showcases, had a warmth entirely lacking in the new wing, whose architecture is glossy, flawless, and inert.

There’s a certain fatigue that sets in after you’ve been inside a museum for an hour.  It’s less physical than mental, and has to do with the stress of taking in a great deal all at once.  So smaller museums often offer a finer experience.  The collections are strongly focused and you’re not exhausted by the time you’re through.  The Design Museum in Gent strikes me this way. The museum has a smart collection of objects by well-known designers like Victor Horta and Christopher Dresser, as well as lesser-known ones, like Gustave Serrurier-Boy and Borek Sipak.

What’s best is how informal the displays are, and how many of the objects have been left unrestored, in their real, battered condition.  Less than a design museum, it seems, at times, like a museum of old everyday things.  I’m accustomed to seeing the Wassily chair in shining leather and chrome, in stores, in corporate waiting rooms, and in apartments.  But to see a vintage one, with cracked leather and spotted chrome, sitting right on the floor, along with other contemporary pieces, all similarly worn, is refreshing.  It reminds you how old (nearly a hundred years) so much canonical modern furniture is, and that it was intended to be used, not stuck on a pedestal at MoMa.