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.