The ICA is the first museum to be built in Boston in 100 years. The building includes an extensive program, from exhibition halls to a multipurpose theater, a restaurant, a bookstore, education/workshop facilities, and administrative offices. It straddles the competing objectives of a dynamic civic building for public programs and a contemplative environment for viewing art.

The site is bound on two sides by the Harborwalk, a 75-kilometer public walkway. The Harborwalk is used as a civic plane that stretches up to form the public grandstand, flattens into the theater stage, and wraps the surfaces of the theater extending into a horizontal tray that holds the gallery and shelters the grandstand. The waterfront is both a great asset for the museum and a distraction from its inwardly focused program. A choreographed passage through the building dispenses the visual context in doses. Upon one’s entry, the view is compressed under the theater’s belly, then scanned by the glass elevator, used as a variable backdrop in the theater, denied entirely in the galleries, and revealed as a panorama at the crossover gallery. The mediatheque suspended under the cantilever edits the context from view, leaving only the texture of water.