By Marvin Hightower

Gazette Staff

Seeing is believing, the old saying goes.

But if it's been a while since you've seen the Center for Conservation and Technical Studies perched atop the Fogg, you won't believe what it looks like now after a grand renovation and expansion.

And because the Center no longer needs its temporary first-floor home in Warburg Hall, that space looks more like its welcome former self again in a new installation called "Investigating the Renaissance."

The University Art Museums have plenty to celebrate, and celebrate they will on Saturday with a series of special talks and tours -- all capped by a gala ball in the Fogg Courtyard.

In all, the Art Museums raised over $12 million to renovate the Center and fund its operations and endowment. In 1994, the Center was named for Philip A. ('37) and Lynn Straus, longtime friends of the Art Museums, whose $7.5 million gift attracted additional support from over 400 additional donors.

Carried out by Boston's Shawmut Design and Construction, the $6.3 million renovation and expansion has kept the shell of the original fourth floor, added about 1,700 square feet of new space over the third-floor roof, and created a large mechanical room on the fourth-floor roof. The result is 8,201 square feet (net) of highly usable fourth-floor space.

Working closely with Center Director Henry Lie and his staff, New York architect Samuel Anderson '75 has transformed formerly cramped and inefficient rooms into spaces notable for their liberating flow of inner and outer perspectives, elegant marriage of traditional and high-tech materials, and attentiveness to the technically complex needs of the distinct groups of conservators who work on paintings, paper, and three-dimensional objects. A fourth laboratory performs analytical work.

For the first time, the Center has its own seminar room and adequate space for its specialized 2,500-volume library. Likewise, historically important samples of artists' materials, some 4,000 X-radiographs of art, and reference collections of aged pigments and media have all received suitable housing.

Entering generously through quadruple-glazed insulated skylights and windows, natural lighting aids the conservatorial eye while playing off a multitude of surfaces: cherry and mahogany cabinetry, maple flooring, beech paneling, stainless-steel sinks transfixed on islands of black slate. You may know next to nothing about conservation when you walk in, but you toy with changing careers in hopes of working here one day. It's that kind of space. The Boston Society of Architects has already picked it to receive a 1996 Honor Award for Excellence in Architecture.

Anderson's design finally provides a state-of-the-art physical plant worthy of the worldwide reputation that the Center has earned since Fogg Director Edward Forbes, a pioneer in scientific art conservation, established a conservation department at the Fogg in 1928, only a year after the Museum had moved into its new Quincy Street home. In so doing, Forbes created the nation's first museum-based facility for conservation treatment, research, and training.

From the very start, the Center led the way in developing now-standard techniques for analyzing the chemical and structural components of art objects and historical artifacts. These techniques, in turn, have expanded our understanding of artists' working methods and materials, helped settle or reframe questions of origin and dating, and guided safe courses of treatment for conservation and restoration around the world. In addition to working with the more than 150,000 objects in the University Art Museums, the Center serves outside clients, both institutional and private.

The cheapest, simplest way of accomplishing the Center's first complete renovation was never the point, according to James Cuno, the Art Museums' Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director. "We felt very much that we were commissioning a space from an architect as if we were commissioning a sculptor or a painter to do a work for us. The results are greater than we anticipated."

That happy outcome is all the more remarkable, given the needs of what Lie calls "an extremely complicated space" with "a million details." But because Anderson and the staff repeatedly conferred on the fine-tuning, Lie expects to run that rarest of facilities in which things actually work as they should. "We know lots of labs where this is not the case," he says.

See the Center for yourself on Saturday, and you'll know why the fourth floor is all smiles these days. As Lie puts it, "The staff is ecstatic."

Saturday's free public symposium on "Investigating the Renaissance" runs from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Sackler Museum. The 12:30 Fogg luncheon and the 8 o'clock ball require tickets. Call 495-4544.