Urban/Wild Duality

Nature inside the Gardner museum

Outside nature in the Back Bay Fens

Constructed in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and bound in both progression and devolution, the neighboring Back Bay Fens and Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum form a reflecting relationship, refracted but forever linked in the changing landscape of the Fenway district. Both landmarks have attempted to tame an urban wild, the driving force of nature, both human and environment– and both have found themselves unavoidably attentive to its wiles. As time has passed, and new layers of usage have shaped the palimpsestic landscape of the Fenway, the original tensions and relationship nevertheless remain between the two cultural loci and their confrontation with the urban habitat.

Olmsted's Back Bay Fens plan, 1887

View of Fenway Court, a.k.a. the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, from the Fens

Iconic landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, best known for Central Park and the Chicago World’s Fair, sketched a plan for what he called the Back Bay Fens in 1887 as a way to clean up the polluted marsh wasteland and attract new life to the area. He believed in the “sanitary” benefits of a park, with its green space for people to enjoy, and anticipated the area to attract wealthy homeowners (1). The people that were to buy the surrounding property, however, were rather from the larger institutions of education, medicine, and, most saliently, culture and the fine arts. Isabella Stewart Gardner first bought a parcel next to the Back Bay Fens in 1899 to make her Venetian-style museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts followed suit ten years later (2). The Boston T cuts right through the MFA, relegating the Gardner to a backyard inferiority that is doubly obscured by the Fenway road and its constant traffic. Despite the quiet crowding of high-minded establishments on the Gardner museum, this corner of the Fenway region has cycled through sinusoidal scumminess, punctuated by construction projects and the opposing, constant strength of the nature that inhabits it.

"Fenway Deity"

Reflection of the "Fenway Deity"

Today, between the remnants of Olmsted’s bridge and a new construction site, a stretch of the near-stagnant water captures a distorted reflection of a new installation on the Northern side of the museum, Fenway Deity: Large Inflatable Garden Deity aka Garden Deity with Gold Chain. Another bridge down, another bend in the river offers a similarly bendy glimpse of a double Prudential Center. These post-modern creations seem perversions of the Boston Brahmin intentions of such big thinkers as Olmsted and Gardner. The psychedelic buoyancy of the “Fenway deity” reveals another attempt of the museum to stay synchronistic with its surroundings, catering to the youth culture of the encompassing educational institutions and the artifice of the glitzy downtown construction projects like the Prudential.