Sullivan's travels come home

World Trade Center West, the signature building of Seaport World Trade Center in Boston, may be my favorite of the diversely creative palette of buildings that kicked off the development of the city's Seaport District but unfortunately failed to inspire future designs of comparable originality there. For me, there are two reasons why this postmodern masterpiece rises above the rest.

Seaport World Trade Center, Boston. Photo by SeaportBostonHotel (CC BY-SA 4.0).

For one, it was designed by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood (KMW) in their signature postmodern style of squared columns articulating and monumentalizing building structure in the classical column tradition, but with the geometric simplicity of those Cuisenaire rods many of us learned mathematical concepts from (or just built things with) in school. 

This gives World Trade Center West an outstanding expression of structural honesty in the soar of its verticality, unlike its undistinguished neighbors, Seaport Boston Hotel (above, center) and World Trade Center East (above, left), whose brick and sandstone cladding largely obscure their structure in a rather pompous fashion—and especially unlike the steel-and-glass skyscrapers that largely dominate Seaport's streetscape now. KMW used brick and a cantilevered cornice on World Trade Center West to recall the historic brick warehouse buildings of nearby Fort Point Channel, and the curving western façade allows more of its offices picturesque waterfront views, with a nod to the brick bowfront architecture of Beacon Hill and the South End as well as the billows of waves and ship sails. "The form, language and materials of the building relate to the maritime character of the site," according to KMW's website.

Wainwright Building (1891, Louis Sullivan), St. Louis, MO.
Photo by W. LeMay (CC BY-SA 2.0).

World Trade Center West also recalls the brick high-rises of Louis Henry Sullivan—my second reason for making it the cream of Seaport's crop. As the virtual inventor of the skyscraper, Sullivan went for an honest, organic expression of the skyscraper's structure and the upward soar of its verticality, hence the brick piers culminating in Celtic-inspired floral ornamentation at the cornice, giving the impression that they are growing up like flowers. That was what Sullivan meant by "form follows function": the soaring vertical form of a skyscraper is shaped by its function as a tall building housing multiple offices, yet it stands as a monument to progress — upward mobility, and the necessity to build taller on limited footprints to house increasing populations of workers. For that was the proper function of the skyscraper, in Sullivan's mind, which gave it its monumental form.

Interestingly enough, Sullivan was born in Boston, but never practiced there. He detested its architecture for being too cramped and old-fashioned for his taste. Ever the innovator, he was drawn to the from-scratch reconstruction of Chicago following its Great Fire of 1871, where he could leave his own imprint on a new city in the sky. So I'm grateful that KMW was paying tribute to Sullivan's Boston origins with their World Trade Center West. This, in effect, brought him home to the city he had abandoned, to show what an impact he had, both in the new Chicago and now in the new neighborhood built from scratch in Boston — the Seaport District.

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