The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 66

CHOICE Interior 'artscapes' Some very public buildings have artistic insides. The Senate Chamber of the State House is statesmanlike and intimate at the same time. You can get the same elegant feeling in the Ritz dining room; it's like eating inside a Wedgwood plate. The new Proud Popover has much lower prices than the Ritz ($4 for a complere meal) and an earlier, Revolutionary decor in the renewed Quincy Market.Nearby is the famous up-sairs room in Faneuil Hall where Boston patriots talked themselves into becoming founding fathers. Go up and say something.

Feel committed? There's a gallery on the fifth floor of City Hall, but I like the flags and pennants in the big brick lobby and concourse best. Unlike most public competitive prizewinners in building design, the City Hall was built. It was designed by the New York firm of Kallman, McKinnell and Knowles. 1 1 iSKfc h' 1 till iVl v' 1 4 By Christina Robb Did you know that there's a Salvador Dali painting in the Prudential Center branch of the New England Merchants Bank? I didn't either till last week and it's huge, fascinating, brilliant. It take up a whole wall at the end of the carpeted path between all the assistant managers, and they don't mind a bit if you walk down there and take a long look.

In the painting's sandy, surreal landscape, men in desert robes aim guns at each other, and the aimed guns bond them into cubes, like molecules. In the center foreground, a white-robed figure has his back to us is he Christ or (look closely) a cloud? To his left some hoary prophet beckons and uplifts a scroll that says, in vague runelike letters that look as if they must mean something profound, or at least sensible, "Galacidalaci-desoxiribunucleicacid." That's also the title Dali gave the wall- sized work when he finished it in 1963. Beyond the prophet, viewed in another perspective, some the features of a huge, stretching man, whose face is in the sky. Devil or angel? Arewe made of aggression; is that the glue that holds us together? Or are we made of grace, or of both? Dali's answer is a completely unbiased maybe. But concept aside, his painting is well composed and finely finished.

To me the Dali painting is another mystery of corporate behavior. Here isthis bank, just a plain old bank, that buys an extraordinary, heroic work by a world famous artist for public display in one of its branches. And then they put a row of plastic plants in front of it. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is 1 free except Sunday, when it's $1, and if you haven't been inside that most interior of Boston buildings, you hardly know what inside can mean. Isabella Stewart Gardner came to Boston from New York, and she alway said it was the cold weather that she didn't like here.

But it's said that some shoulders chilled her, too. In any case, when she built the mansion she meant to die in and leave to the city as her monument, she built it without an outside. When you get to 280 the Fenway, all you see is walls. No light or life. The place could be a prison from the outside.

But it's not; it's a kind of architectural safe instead, completely turned inward to protect and attend to the treasures it's packed with. The three-story court, filled with exotic flowering plants and statuary from half a dozen cultures, is always lushly and tranquilly excessive. You can look at it for half an hour and then drowse off the way you would after a big meal, it's such an enormous meal for your eyes. The court has too much of everything including space. Some of the rooms around it have too much of everything but space.

Sometimes they strike me as what a museum quality art market would look like. You can go inside other houses in Boston and be inside art. Inside the Harrison Gray Otis house, 141 Cambridge you'll see the classic shapes and gaudy color mixes of early Federal building. The Gibson House, 137 Beacon shows you what Victorian life was like inside. 1 Arjr- i mi 4r Essex MBTA Station (Globe photos by Joseph Dennehy) tnm r4V isa Tm fex iii-1 George Greenamyer's locomotive bas-relief in The Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the jrs i George Greenamyer's locomotive bas-relief in Essex Station won a compteition, too.

The MBTA has used murals in its station improvement program (the flag one in Government Center wins in my book) but Greenamyer's 9 by 18-foot, 10-ton steel evocation of a steam locomotive is the first sculpture they've bought. See it southbound, just before the Orange Line moves up and outside for the El. The New England Aquarium has the most exotic and elegant interior in the city. The big tank and the spirial walk around it show up New York's Guggenheim Museum. The marble of the Music Hall lobby always makes me feel very grand, and so does the court of the Copley Plaza, where you can sip afternoon tea amid roses, doillies and classless sandwiches (no crust).

Trinity Church, designed by H. H. Richardson, is usually open, and the dark wood and gold inside is rich and almost Byzantine. By contrast, the interior of the First Parish Church of Cambridge in Harvard Square, designed by Isaiah Rogers in 1833 and remodeled by Allen W. Jackson in 1928, is all light the whole front a shuttered fan.

St. Paul's in Cambridge, where Bow and Arrow streets meet, has a marble interior built in the 1930s that is a perfect con- tainer for choral sound. Yes, you can get inside sound, too, and that's art. Compare the carpenter's Goth-ic sound of the Victorian Sanders The- v' ater, in Harvard's Memorial Hall, Cam--' bridge, to the cushier bounce of sound inside MIT's Kresge Auditorium, off Mas. avenue, two blocks from the river.

You can line early for the 7:30 p.m. open rehearsal of the Boston Symphony Or-' chestra Dec. 15 and pay your $3, then rush to the center of the first row of the iChtfstipa ifiobb ,1 Gob6 correspondent. Don't forget galleries. The CarpenterXenter, the round concrete and glass building on Quincy street, next to the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, is the only building in America designed by Swiss master architect Le Corbusier.

A show of Harvard artists's work opens Nov. 12 in the gallery on the first floor. The gallery of the Boston Atheneum, WA Beacon is on the second floor, which gives you an excuse to climb the stairs and view the first-floor reading room from a mezzanine. Built in the 1840s, the interior is large and neoclassical without seeming like a monument. The Newbury street galleries are all public.

And free for browsers. So is the Impressions Workshop Gallery, 27 Stanhope Boston, if you like graphics. The Boston Visual Artistis Union gallery at 3 Center Plaza has a larger more interesting space than any gallery except the one at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Boston. It's free Friday 2 to 5 p.m. Have you been inside the Cyclorama? It's a huge, skylit, round wonderful room, built for bicycle sales demonstrations there were cars, in 1884.

The Boston Center for the Arts has it now, and any event they sponsor there, under that wonderful glass dome at 539 Tremont is worth attending just to get a feel for the room. YOU Can nfit a linht meal there ftatnrHau Have you been 'm the court of the old Boston Public Library? The trees there have personal fan clubs. People who sit in that court a lot, in wooden chairs by the yellow-brick walls, on a flagstone walk, facing the hedges and fountain at the center, become addicted to its pecu-lair peace. John Singer Sargent painted some religious murals in the old BPL, and there's a fine print gallery. You might go and look at the Sargent murals as background for the show of his small works that opens at the Museum of Fine Arts next month.

Boston has lots of interior public art and lots of artistic public interiors. If you want to know more about it, and to see some of it, visit the Institute of Contemporary Art's Public Art section, in the old police substation next to the ICA gallery at 955 Boylston st. Public Art gives away free brochures about local museums and other places to see art and free listings of arts events, and the walls are covered with announcements of gallery openings, lectures, cheap and free performances of music and dance. They compiled last year. Mark Lassiter, who runs the center, says its object is "giving people enough alternatives so that they can make their own decisions" about what art to see and support.

During the summer, the center sends artists around in its Art Cart to help kids learn to appreciate art by watching the artists at work. "The public will decide," Lassiter says. The ICA Is helping us learn to decide. So is the MFA. The doors behind the supplicating American Indian on horseback, Cyurs E.

Dallin's "Appeal to the Great Spirit," open every Tuesday night at 5 for free. And they stay open till 9 p.m. Then some of the finest art in the world becomes trulv oubiie. because van in Copley Square (O 4) i3 a to ffl UJ Trinity Church, designed by H. H.

Richardson, Courtyard at the Boston Public Library i f.v),v,. ill 5 1 jii.h, ii i.iini.i.1i iiii im ihihii hi) i i.iIiiiiii -mini nfY ID X) in CQ r- af (Gotoe fife photo) Courtyard at the Isabella 10-4 p.m..at a French cafe sponsored balcony and. learn what itleels like to the French Library Or you pan have riboside. 8 room full of beautifuj sound some bit of junH thafs lying around the Mrwts sound superbly. a.

attic am that! you'yefalwayg suspected that's public art, too, and you're in the was art appraised there for $5 by the i best spot to take it in. -prestigious aucfioii fyJuse of Sotheby UJ 1 vv( i Jfjp Stewart Gardner Museum i 12 can see it for nothing. 13 i .1.