The best space is the ground-floor café, which feels sleek and fresh. It has a warmer palette than the rest of the building — orange plastic chairs contrasting with the gray and black floor and furniture. And here the windows on two sides are just right, creating a place of relaxation and release rather than distracting.
The shows will change, the cracked elevator glass will be fixed, computers that keep crashing in the computer lab will stop crashing, but we’re stuck with this building. Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell called it “the most inventive, most interesting piece of local architecture since the Hancock Tower.” The comparison is apt only because this is another blah building destined to become a Boston landmark because it’s big and prominently located. We’ll love it because it’s all we’ve got.
Related:
Promise deferred, Dear Ketel One drinker, Game show, More 
- Promise deferred
Last December 10, the Institute of Contemporary Art moved to brand new digs on the South Boston waterfront, tripling its exhibition space in the process.
- Dear Ketel One drinker
That weird Gothic lettering, the direct yet formal tone — what exactly are Ketel One Vodka’s ads supposed to signify?
- Game show
On November 12, the Institute of Contemporary Art opened its biennial Foster Prize exhibit of “Boston-area artists of exceptional promise.”
- Smoke and mirrors (and elephants) at the ICA
Not into wheatpasting and framed posters? The ICA is about to serve up two shows by artists who promise not to pop up on street walls all over the city.
- Seal of approval
Photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia is a safe, easy choice for the new ICA’s first big artist retrospective.
- New new things
Robolobster, an underwater crustacean with eight plastic legs and an industrial-strength plastic shell, is a groundbreaking example of the new science of biomimicry.
- The roar of the greasepaint
“Theatricality” used to have negative connotations when used to describe fine art: glitzy surface rather than nourishing substance, suspiciously melodramatic gesture, the faked as opposed to the Real.
- Questioning the Real
The Maine College of Art’s MFA thesis group show rides a questionable line between relevant social critique buoyed by valid critical theory and an egocentric interplay of misplaced postmodern gestures.
- Majoring and minering in theater
The re-enactment is part community therapy, part exorcism; the resulting video is tense and visceral and heartbreaking.
- Bad-boy cool
“People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.”
- I’m your fan
It’s time to smash that big bottle of champagne over the bow of Boston’s glossy, glassy new Institute of Contemporary Art, as the museum throws open the lofty doors to its new Diller Scofidio + Renfro–designed digs on Boston’s Fan Pier.
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Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Visual Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art, Cultural Institutions and Parks, More
, Visual Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art, Cultural Institutions and Parks, Museums, Architecture, Design, Jeff Koons, Anish Kapoor, Barbara Lee, Nicholas Baume, Less
