Preserving the Past: A Neo-Venetian Style Facade

In this photograph of the facade of the museum, you can see the stark contrast between the Venetian-style facade of the original building and the modern New Wing edition.

This is a picture of the facade of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. To the right is the original building, a four-story Venetian-style house inspired by the Palaces in Italy. Over the years, as patronage grew for the museum, an addition had to be made in order to accomodate crowds. The New Wing is glass-encased, designed by architect Renzo Piano. 

When Renzo Piano first walked through the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum before beginning his design, he was quoted as sayning, "This lady was mad. No one can do it." He was joking, though, and in 2012, Piano's glass masterpiece was openend. Piano called the new addition "a respectful nephew to a great aunt." I highlight these quotes because they're indicative of what seems to be a greatly agreed upon truth: the musuem is an extension of its creator. 

This combination of new and old is reminiscent of McLuhan’s Medium is the Massage. Six pages are taken up by the Fairmount Water Works in Philadelphia, Penna. The caption on the  final page reads: “we impose the form of the old on the content of the new. The malady lingers on”. McLuhan here is gesturing towards our desire to constantly remake the things into something both totally similar and utterly different from what they originally were. He says: “environments are invisible”. Everything McLuhan says is somewhat elusive, even when it seems concrete. This particular sentiment I take as a discussion on how we forget the ways in which we need the past, how easily it slips from our minds. In the ISG Museum’s melding of old and new, we see what McLuhan was highlighting in the Fairmount Water Works. 

There is a sense that Gardner herself is still present within the walls of the museum. Time is preserved, everything has stopped and stayed exactly as it appeared inn 1924, when Gardner died. The New Wing, the “respectful nephew” serves as a passageway, encased in glass, into the original walls of what once was a home. The art still lives where it always has, in its Venetian Palace.