Even though current economic conditions pose a challenge to funding, HAM has garnered enough financial support to preserve the integrity of the original plans for renovation. While the cost of the new museum was previously projected at $350 million, the renovation is fortunately the only building project currently underway at Harvard. According to Lentz, HAM has raised between 81 and 82 percent of the target amount, largely thanks to a strong belief among donors and university administrators that renovation is imperative. “The financial downturn has not helped,” Lentz says. “But I think when you have a good plan, when you have a real need and you can articulate that effectively, I think people want to be a part of it.”

Similarly, Eugene Y. Wang, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art in the HAA department, believes that caring for the museum and its collections is a worthwhile investment at any cost. “When people come to visit Harvard, the art museum is where almost all people make a stop,” he says. “[It] is the highlight of the campus, so… financial difficulties shouldn’t hold this back.”

When a large-scale renovation was first conceived in 1956, disagreements between the museum and the university over budget delayed the project’s implementation. “The [Harvard]Corporation did not have a vision for the museums, and the museum people had a vision,” says HAA Professor John M. Rosenfield, who served as Curator of Oriental Art at the Fogg from 1964 to 1991 and Acting Director of the museums from 1982 to 1985. For reasons Rosenfield did not detail, the university was unable to allocate the funds that museum officials required to carry out the necessary transformation. However, Rosenfield expresses optimism about the collaboration between today’s HAM and the current university administrators, who seem far more supportive.  “In my years in the operations of the museum I always felt that… the museum’s development and the plans of the corporation were not closely coordinated,” says Rosenfield. “But… in recent years, the coordination seems to have become more advanced.”

REDRAWING BOUNDARIES

Fifty years after these initial squabbles, HAM can begin to realize its vision. However, due to constantly evolving notions regarding how museums should function, the new plans differ significantly from the originals. Though the Fogg’s brick façade has been carefully preserved, in the future it will encompass a interior space that differs dramatically from the original in both architectural and conceptual ways.

The museum’s original central courtyard and the basic layout of galleries will remain, but visitor circulation and arrangement of research spaces will be significantly re-orchestrated. The new wing on Prescott Street, which will house the Busch-Reisinger and Sackler collections, will finally consolidate all the collections.

The long-anticipated integration of the museum’s culturally diverse holdings comes in response to modern conceptions about the study and practice of art history.  “Our notion of art history is changing,” says Professor Wang. “We are thinking of art objects in a more global context. I want to see this global sense being emphasized, in a space that will make it easier to cross [over] from different parts of the world.”

Lentz anticipates that the museum’s physical reorganization will spark a conceptual reconsideration in visitors. “In the past, the way we were physically configured, we weren’t able to make the historical and visual linkages we wanted to make between those three collections,” he says. The renovators hope that within a spatially integrated setting, viewers will more easily identify the continuity between the many traditions, cultures, and eras represented in the collections.

VISUAL AID

The new museum also hopes to emphasize community outreach. The arena of engagement with the broader public is a relatively new one for HAM, which has traditionally given academic pursuits priority. “There was outreach, but that was never the main purpose,” says Rosenthal of his time at the museum. “The main purpose was to promote scholarship.” Previously, the enormous amount of space allocated to the university left little room for the public, and practical considerations thwarted attempts at community outreach before they began. “It’s difficult to have a broad public outreach program if there’s nowhere to park the buses,” Rosenthal says.

However, the museum’s decision to hire a full-time educational staff signals a shift in values, and the new building’s design will take these into consideration. “The spaces will be bigger—more art to be seen, more connections to be made,” says Ray Williams, HAM’s first Director of Education. With innovative educational facilities, such as the study rooms, the museum staff can turn to previously unaddressed questions. “What educators think about is ‘Who could these collections matter for?’ ‘How can we spread the word?’” Williams says.

In the past year, Harvard museums have worked with over 4,000 public school students and 7,000 university students in the Boston area. They have also brought students from Harvard Medical School into galleries for workshops on self-care, and placed an emphasis on reaching out to the local Brazilian community.

E PLURIBUS UNUM

Though display space will be dramatically reconfigured, Lentz estimates that the design team has spent more time laying out non-public space for study and research than on gallery floor plans. “What we want above all is a highly functional building that allows for high-level research,” says Lentz. “Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is reposition the art museum within Harvard’s mission statement, having in place a physical model that allows students and faculty to work collaboratively.”

In keeping with these goals, the new building will allocate over 5,000 square feet of space for temporary and curricular use. Harvard’s Strauss Center for Conservation, the first art conservation lab in the United States, will be relocated to the top floor of the new building while a complex of study centers will occupy the floor below. Through the study centers, Harvard affiliates and other community members can request supervised access to pieces not on display in the museum. The centers are part of a larger effort to make works of art more accessible. “We want to put the collection to work for all students and all faculty, and the community,” says Lentz, “not simply for the specialists we always have had and always will train.”