At Harvard, three museums become one

CAMBRIDGE. Three Harvard museums are united under one roof and open to the public, after six years of construction. The idea of the project, developed by Renzo Piano, extends far beyond the simple expansion of the gallery’s exhibition space, combining more than 250,000 works of art in one of the most valuable collections in the world.

“Many people think it was just a long, complicated, and expensive construction project,” says Thomas Lenz, director of art museums at Harvard University. “But we included everything in it: constructive, conceptual and functional modernization.” Before the reconstruction, the Fogg Museum, which specializes in European and American art, the Bush-Reisinger Museum, specializing in the art of German-speaking countries, and the Arthur Sackler Museum, which is a museum of Asian art and antiquities, are operated in relative isolation. “The curators didn’t even talk to each other,” Lenz says, although the building of the Bush-Reisinger Museum is located close to the back of the Fogg Museum, and the Sackler Museum is less than a block away.

Under the pyramidal glass roof of Piano, which rises above the neo-Georgian building of the Fogg Museum, there is now an additional space on which all three curators work at the same time, creating a single exhibition of art from different collections. Now that visitors pass through the central courtyard, filled with light, they can see ancient Greek and Roman sculptures located next to the works of Auguste Rodin, Louise Bourgeois and Felix González-Torres. Renaissance paintings and sculptures from the collections of the Fogg and Bush-Reisinger museums will also be presented for the first time in a joint exhibition.

As a result, the united space of the united museums more fully presents the history of art. Although at the design stage there were some doubts related to logistical difficulties, it was already clear then that the outcome would be a grand event for Harvard. A key aspect of the project was the proper alignment of lighting for all rooms, and especially the new gallery. The result of the work of Piano broke all standard ideas about the country’s largest art criticism training center, forcing students, teachers and the public to see in a new way all the treasures of museum collections.

Anna Sidorova © Gallerix.ru