Entrance to BMFA’s 1981 I.M. Pei-designed West Wing, now open only for groups and handicapped visitors
Now that you’ve flown through the planned Downtown Whitney, it’s time to hike around the vast perimeter of the completed (at least for now) Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which last month opened its 121,307-square-foot, Norman Foster-designed Art of the Americas Wing.
As CultureGrrl readers may remember, I did a U-turn on the highway during my fall-folliage trip to the press preview for the BMFA’s expansion, because our home-hospice nurse called to say that my mother’s health was failing. When I did make it up north, a few weeks late, I did my own self-guided press tour (except for a curator-guided tour of the refurbished and reinstalled gallery for 18th-century European art and decorative arts).
As you can tell from my narration, I didn’t know quite what to expect as I began my inspection at the front of the West Wing. That 1981 I.M. Pei-designed building had been the main entrance to the museum before 1995, when Malcolm Rogers reopened the much grander Huntington Avenue entrance of the original 1909 building, designed by Boston architect Guy Lowell.
This videoed walkabout is in two parts: Below, the old MFA, with just a glimpse of the new as we round the east corner of the old building.
COMING SOON: My take on the Foster addition and a look at the next expansion site.