Institute for Contemporary Art

Diller, Scofidio + Renfro (known until recently as Diller + Scofidio), the new ICA's architects, have been hard at work for a quarter century. But they have built only a few normal buildings with roofs and walls and windows. You can, in fact, count them on one hand. Instead, they have produced what the Whitney Museum called in a 2003 retrospective exhibition of the firm's work, "aberrant architectures."

Just what is aberrant architecture? Take, for example, the firm's best known creation. Designed as an exhibition pavilion for SWISS Expo 2002, "Blur Building" (2002) was a cloud of water vapor on Lake Neuchatel , in Yverdon-les-Bains. Some 31,500 spray nozzles, linked to sophisticated weather sensors, creating an ever-shifting fog bank that hovered over the waves. Approached by ramps and causeways built over the lake, this virtual structure had no facade, no shape, no substance. This was architecture turned on its head. Instead of providing shelter, the Blur Building created the weather.

Aberrant architecture may have been born partly out of necessity. When Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio founded their firm in 1979, stagflation and malaise were the national trends. Not much was being built anywhere. Even as the economy recovered in the 1980s, large, well-established architectural firms, with corporate track records, snagged almost all the work. So Diller + Scofidio joined a generation of "virtual" architects -- designers who worked more with ideas and theories than with physical buildings.

Over the next twenty-five years, the firm's projects included an exhibition of toy robots ("Master/Slave," 1999) and one about the meaning of lawns ("The American Lawn, Surface of Everyday Life," 1998), an unbuilt seaside vacation house ("Slow House," 1991), a New York restaurant ("Brasserie," 2000), an ambitious museum of media arts, shelved for lack of funding ("Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology," 2002), a Japanese housing project ("Slither Building," 2000), and many installation, dance, and performance pieces -- all in all, a body of work closer to conceptual art or new media than to what architecture has been for the last 10,000 years.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the twenty-first century . Everything got virtualized. Nowadays, intellectual property -- patents, copyrights, processes -- is far more valuable than factories, equipment, or real estate. In the era of the Internet, even dating is digital.

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Suddenly, idea-based designers like Diller Scofidio+ Renfro seemed a lot less marginal. After all, the contemporary office building or mass-market retail store is really just a metal box partly filled with wires, chips, and ductwork -- closer to your desktop computer than the Pantheon or even the Empire State Building. Maybe the virtual architects were quietly setting the stage for the first true rethinking of architecture since the Roman Empire. As the century turned, the firm and its architects won a slew of awards, including the Smithsonian's 2005 National Design Award in Architecture.

The new ICA building, which will open to the public in September, is by far the most physical manifestation of Diller, Scofidio + Renfrow's new status as architectural gurus. It is constructed around a simple, clear plan and a series of ideas -- transparent, framing, views, change, openness, and the mysteries of water -- that hold up the building as much as its massive steel beams hold up its boldly cantilevered galleries.

Compared to counterparts in other cities, the ICA building is relatively modest, even domestic, in scale. There is something about it of the cheerful, clean-lined modernism of the 1950s -- when technology and design were supposed to make everything simpler, brighter, more convenient. In renderings, the design looks a bit like an especially elegant household appliance -- a coffee maker, perhaps, or a new kind of projection TV.

Two ideas in particular dominate the planning. One is public access. Built astride a planned "Harbor Walk" along the water, the lower levels of the building, exterior and exterior, are all public spaces. Sheltered by the massive cantilever, there is an outdoor "grandstand" or set of steps, facing the water, designed not as an entrance but as a gathering space, like the street front of the Metropolitan Museum. Above the grandstand, glass walls reveal the museum's theatre beyond. To the left of it, a new restaurant will offer seating inside and out. On an upper floor are a series of classrooms for public education programs.

The galleries will be on the top floor of the building, the west side designated for special exhibitions, the east for the ICA's new permanent collections. Lit by skylights that will be screened by translucent fabric, the galleries are deliberately shielded from the panoramic views outside. This "framing" of the views, as the architects call it, is the other key idea of the building.

In the "Mediatheque," a gallery for viewing new media work hung like a projection booth under the cantilever, the seating is angled towards the harbor. A single window allows only views of the water, cropping out both sky and land. The unconventional, horizonless perspective is a bit unsettling, like the view from an airplane landing over Boston Harbor, but the effect is intended to be meditative, focusing on the Zen-like changes in the color, texture, and transparency of the water.

It is impossible to judge a building still under construction. Unlike an idea, the new ICA will have to function as usable space. Will the building manage Boston's August humidity and stand up to winter storms and rain? Will the galleries complement the art? Will the massive glass elevator function on a daily basis? Will the public spaces be inviting in good weather and foul? Will the design's New Age sensibilities cloy over time? Only time will tell.

But some buildings, even as ruins, have the presence of something important, something that changes the entire planet in some subtle way. And the new ICA, in its incomplete state, has that aura, too.

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