Allston Will House Fogg

Harvard has picked the construction site for a new art museum, University officials announced Monday night.

The museum, which will temporarily host art collections displaced due to renovations, will be built in Allston at 224 Western Ave.

The site, just past Soldiers Field near “Barry’s Corner,” is next to an intersection that is key to Harvard’s plans to revitalize the Allston area, according to Kathy Spiegelman, Chief Planner for Harvard’s Allston Development Group.

But design plans have yet to be completed, according to University officials.

The new museum will initially display the collections of the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums in 2008 while their Quincy St. home is closed for renovations. It will also temporarily hold works from the Sackler Museum.

When the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger re-open, the new Allston museum will permanently house a collection of contemporary art, said Harvard University Art Museum spokesman Daron J. Manoogian.

University officials made the nascent plans public at Monday’s meeting with Allston residents to solicit community opinion.

“It was just a preliminary conceptual presentation,” said Kevin McCluskey ’76, Harvard’s director of community relations. “We need to develop a lot more of the details and come back to the community and the city to continue our discussion about it.”

As part of the proposed building’s “cool, conceptual” design, one third of its facilities will be underground, and its height will vary from 60 feet to 30 feet to accommodate neighboring homes, Spiegelman and Manoogian said.

The museum will replace a truck garage, according to Ray Mellone, the chairman of the Allston Civic Association’s Harvard Task Force.

Some residents said they were wary of throwing their full support behind the project at such an early stage.

Harvard is “a good distance from having community support,” said Paul Berkeley, president of the Allston Civic Association. “It’s the first look and people have to figure out what it means for the neighborhood.”

Some Allston residents at the meeting raised concerns about providing enough parking to avoid clogging the busy intersection.

Others questioned whether the museum would fit into Harvard’s plan to reinvigorate the area by building commercial venues to attract visitors, according to Mellone.

“A permanent museum has always been in Harvard’s plan for Barry’s Corner,” said Spiegelman, Allston’s chief planner. “Museums bring the most people to our campus and the plan has always slated for museums to be close to Barry’s Corner to bring more people to that intersection.”

Berkeley also pointed out that a Harvard museum in Allston was symbolically fitting.

“An art museum in Allston would be very appropriate because Allston is the only town in America named after an American artist,” said Berkeley of the pioneering 19th-century American landscape painter Washington Allston—a member of the Harvard Class of 1800.