View of the Harvard Art Museums. via
After almost twenty years of failed plans and false starts, Harvard University has recently combined the collections of its three museums—the Fogg, the Busch-Reisinger, and the Arthur M. Sackler—into one new building designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and its local partner, the design firm Payette. The Harvard Art Museums, known as HAM, include ample galleries, studios for the conservation center, auditoriums, classrooms, viewing rooms, and even the Naumburg Room, a hidden-away Jacobean hall reconstructed as a lounge for faculty, staff, and students. HAM’s opening, six years after the doors to the original Fogg were closed, has reunited the University with its treasury of art in a building that fulfills the needs of its programs. This new collection of museums under one glass roof, known as the lantern, will support scholarship, teaching, conservation, and exhibitions for a very long time to come, but its functional success comes in the guise of a building that discloses the influence of ideas that, while accepted as the basis of making museums today, do not always lead to good architecture.
Novel ideas go hand in hand with actual designs as the calling cards of the top echelon of architects today. Museums entrust this level of the profession not just to make buildings that work, but also often to make landmarks that reflect each institution’s quest for that fleeting cutting edge of culture. Other than Frank Gehry, who for better or worse has
