For most of my vacation in remote Maine last week, I saw only the occasional loon and the insides of books. But I had one final afternoon in Boston, so I zipped between the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a dimly lit palace of strange and wonderful excess (leather walls! this unbelievable silver-skinned-virgin death by Fra Angelico! this ostrich! giant empty frames where Rembrandts were stolen and haven’t been recovered!) and the new, super-contemporary Institute of Contemporary Art, overlooking the harbor and designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

At the ICA, half of the galleries were closed for installation, and the art that was in the other half was just okay. What I’d really come for anyway was the architecture, in particular the somewhat irritatingly named Mediatheque, a gem of a room in the museum that leans over the harbor.

First, though, back at the creaky Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, I stood and stared at this:

It’s Titian’s Europa, a huge, rather amazing thing with two scary and toothy fish in the water at the bottom. What’s so great about the painting is Titian’s refusal to give you Europa’s response to her abduction by Zeus-in-disguise. Her arm is flung over her face so you can’t see it. Copies of this painting by other artists give it away: either she’s ecstatic or she’s terrified. But Titian plays it close, which gives the painting even more unsettling power. When the Boston Globe surveyed city museum directors, they overwhelmingly declared this Boston’s most important work of art.

Then there’s the ICA Mediatheque, a room you enter from the top. It has bleacher-like seats, equipped with computers for visitors to use (to watch videos, or look at more information about the shows, or see student artworks online). The bleachers descend toward the large window that leans out over the water. It’s a vertiginous lean, providing a view of the water but no view of sky or land or anything else unless you get closer to the window.

In this photo of the building, the Mediatheque is the room under the overhang that looks like it has descended like an old-time tape deck waiting for a tape to be inserted. (How odd that it reminds me of such old technology; I’m sure this isn’t what they had in mind.)

When you walk into the room at the top of the bleachers, this is what you see in front of you:

It’s a dizzying vision, like being in an underwater room, a room in which gravity has shifted.

Or like looking down on the water as you’re being swept up away from it—like what Europa might have seen, minus the computers.