BOSTON — “People don’t usually get this vantage point,” said Jill Medvedow, the longtime director of the Institute of Contemporary Art here. She was in a water taxi plowing across Boston Harbor, looking back toward her museum hovering at the water’s edge in the Seaport area. When she moved the museum, founded in 1936, to this once-isolated neighborhood of South Boston in 2006, its innovative building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro was orphaned in a sea of parking lots.
Now the area is brimming with new construction, and Ms. Medvedow, 63, is leading her institution into another less-trammeled area. At the end of the six-minute boat ride, alighting on a dock in East Boston, Ms. Medvedow strode through an active shipyard and marina. Pointing to the facade of a squat structure sheathed in luminous polycarbonate, she pronounced, “Here’s our Watershed!”
It was formerly a copper pipe factory with a dilapidated roof and asbestos-filled garage doors at either end. Ms. Medvedow persuaded the Massachusetts Port Authority, the agency that operates nearby Logan Airport and public terminals, to lease the condemned, 15,000-square-foot space for monumental artist projects. It was given a new roof and was brought up to code by Anmahian Winton Architects.