Arriving the wrong way

Not all that many years ago, my ex-wife and I made one of our many trips to Holland to spend Christmas with her mother, sister and brother-in-law Gerard and their new baby. The whole lot of us then jetted off to Nice for a weekend (not quite the European equivalent of a $69 round-trip special from Boston to Orlando, but close). Once there we decided to head up the coast to Monte Carlo for an afternoon. We arrived by bus in a rather nondescript section of what is probably the most storied seaside principality on the planet. Our little entourage (complete with baby carriage) wound slowly along the main drag toward the older part of the city, then unexpectedly came off a side street onto the Place du Casino. The spectacularly infamous Beaux-arts facade of Monte Carlo’s casino towered over us.

“Wow,” I said.

The girls, being girls, went shopping. Us men found a table at an outdoor cafe on the square and tried to look sophisticated. We ordered drinks, lit up some Dutch cigars, and took it all in— and there was a lot to take in, most of it having to do with ridiculous wealth.

“I grew up in South Jersey,” I said. “I never thought I’d see this, but I kind of feel like the bus is the wrong way to arrive in Monte Carlo.”

Gerard grunted, then gestured with his cigar as a red Ferrari 360 Modena roared into the square, navigated expertly around the ornate fountain in the middle, and growled to a halt at the foot of the steps leading up to the grand main entrance. A perfectly groomed middle-aged man climbed out of the driver’s side, handed the keys to a valet, and opened the passenger side door. A perfectly groomed young blond woman emerged, took his hand, and they walked up the steps into the casino.

“That’s the right way,” Gerard said.

I mention this here because, should you decide to visit the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston’s Waterfront District (which you should), don’t take the Silver Line to the World Trade Center stop. That's the wrong way. Sizing up this architectural masterpiece while approaching on foot through Anthony Athanas’ vast parking lot is a lot like trying to appreciate a cancan dancer from backstage. One quickly feels somewhat ripped off when one realizes that all of the good stuff is pointing in the opposite direction.

The building's big, pallid, blocky backside, as it addresses Northern Avenue, is simply butt-ugly. And it is apparently arrogantly so, since its location and scale dominates everything in its immediate vicinity (as of this writing, Anthony’s Pier 4 Restaurant and several acres of asphalt). I was thinking how a nice “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco” mural might dress up the place a bit, or, better yet, draping that huge inflatable padlock and chain from the self-storage warehouse on the Southeast Expressway around the unnervingly massive HVAC plant on the museum’s roof. The building is nothing as advertised until it is viewed from the business end, which is how we would have seen it had my friends and I de-bussed at the Courthouse station (our bad). Once we traversed the parking lot, found an opening in the chain-link fence and made our way around to the museum’s proper face on Boston Harbor, the brilliance of the structure revealed itself to us in all of its impossibly-overhanging glass-encased beauty.

“Wow,” I said.

We went to the ICA to check out the terrific Philip-Lorca DiCorcia show. I know this is supposed to be a photography-related blog, but I will leave it to you to either visit the show while it’s in town (through September 7, 2007) or discover more on your own about an artist the ICA anoints as “among the most influential and innovative photographers of the past thirty years”. Under another set of circumstances, I might even have had something to say about that. But right now I can’t get the image of that 4-sided white box with 2 good sides, its back turned on what is quickly becoming the hippest, most vibrant corner of the city, out of my architecturally-untrained noggin. Am I missing something here, like maybe the master plan for the site? Probably. But this humble first time visitor had the very distinct impression of arriving at the ICA “the wrong way”, an impression that really doesn’t make sense for a high-profile building that is standing in the middle of a parking lot. It wasn’t exactly like arriving in Monte Carlo “the wrong way”, but it left me with a similar vague feeling of not being smart enough (or rich enough) to appreciate the place the way the really smart (or rich) folks do.

Speaking of Monte Carlo, by the way, just as that perfectly groomed couple was about to disappear into the casino, the gentleman turned around to watch as the valet climbed into his Ferrari, started it up, and proceeded to grind the gears and stall the thing over and over until its owner interceded and parked it himself. Gerard and I got a kick out of that.

Right way? Wrong way? Le plus ca change, le plus c'est la meme chose.