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| Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, opens new wing  The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), unveiled a major redevelopment and new wing designed by Foster + Partners. The masterplan reinstates the original formal axis of the Museum and opens it up to the Back Bay Fens and the linear park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1877. The MFA's new wing creates 53 new galleries and houses the Art of the Americas collections, one of the premier assemblages of American art.Foster + Partners, working with CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares of Boston, have carefully restored and augmented one of the world's finest art museums to transform the experience for visitors, opening up the building to the community and consolidating the Museum's five great collections into a more cohesive and understandable whole. Founded in 1870, the Museum of Fine Arts is based on a Beaux-Arts plan devised by the architect Guy Lowell. Restoring the logic of the original scheme, the building's central axis has been reasserted with the reintroduction of the principal entrance to the south, on Huntington Avenue on the Avenue of the Arts, and the reopening of that to the north, the State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance. At the heart of this axis is a new information centre, where visitors begin their tour. Alongside is a freestanding glazed structure, which has been inserted between the building's two main pavilions to create the Art of the Americas Wing. Arranged over four floors, the new wing significantly increases the Museum's exhibition space, enabling some 5, 000 works from the collection to be displayed. The project is the first time Foster + Partners has comprehensively designed a complete gallery wing, including installations and fit-out – the plan for the 53 galleries was the result of close collaboration with the Museum's curators and conservators. Where the central building of the wing meets the axis of the main building, it partly encloses an existing courtyard in glass. This creates spaces for visitors, a café, special events and access to other collections with a new gallery for special exhibitions beneath. write your comments about the article :: © 2010 Construction News :: home page |