International studio (33.1907/1908(1908))

New Boston Museum

constitutes a complete miniature museum, which
the visitor may enter and leave without traversing
any other department; coordination of depart-
ments with reference to accessibility, traversability
and lighting. Displaying the results of the high-
est professional scholarship available in Boston,
the plans of the new museum emphasize these points
of construction.
Embodying them, a group of three interconnected
buildings—a museum proper, a basilica for casts
and an art school—will shortly occupy a site of
nearly twelve acres between Huntington Avenue
and the Fenway. Neighboring institutions are the
Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, Simmons Col-
lege for Women, the New England Conservatory
of Music, Symphony Hall, the Harvard-Medical
School, Tufts Medical School, the Normal School
group. Towering over the district is the great
dome of the new Christian Science Church. The
new museum will be properly conspicuous from
either of the parallel avenues. There will be at
first no axial approach, though one may—and
seemingly must—at some time be developed through
the region, now somewhat squalid, but certain to
be improved, which lies between the other side of
Huntington Avenue and Roxbury Crossing.
The main front of the building tells the archi-
tectural story. The intention to invite the man in
the street is evident. A setback of seventy-five
feet removes the museum sufficiently from the dust
and noise of traffic and gives opportunity for deco-
rative shrubbery and outdoor sculpture arranged
in the grass plots on either side of the ornamental
forecourt. The two projecting pavilions extend
like waiting arms, alluring the wayfarer toward
the main entrance. Nothing meretricious, of

course, is suggested in the appeal. The fafade is
not dazzlingly alluring, like the front of a depart-
ment store, executed in accordance with Part nou-
veau. Architectural extravagance would be un-
seemly in an art museum. Hence the propriety
of the somewhat formal style that has been fol-
lowed. Though primarily expressing the idea of
invitation, the elevation is dignified, symmetrical,
classical; and in being so it accords with the pres-
ent tendency toward restraint, logic and style.
The front is thus in contrast with the highly col-
ored Victorian fafade of the present building in
Copley Square, a reminiscence of the taste of 1875,
when one read Ruskin and sincerely believed that
an array of pointed arches and variegated stone-
work would reproduce the spirit of Gothic archi-
tecture. The interior arrangements of the main
installation on the Huntington Avenue site are
logically indicated in the extension of the building.
The upper floor, devoted to the “exhibition
series,” is the main floor. Its superior facilities
for lighting entitle it to this rank. The lower
floor comprises the rooms devoted to the “study
series,” to storerooms and administration offices.
Thus, one who has special business to transact at
the Museum, as to consult an official or to pursue
an investigation with the assistance of a curator,
is not obliged to ascend a flight of stairs. Those,
however, who enter for the enjoyment of seeing
some of the best things in the Museum attractively
displayed, will not, it is argued, object to going up
an easy staircase leading to a great central rotunda,
the architectural “clou” of the whole project, from
which radiate avenues of circulation to the different
departments.
So logically are the parts of the Museum related


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