Shortly after attending a talk at the Boston Public Library on Boston University's new Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences – aka the "Jenga Building," for its skyline resemblance to stacked blocks or books – I caught sight of another BU building worthy of mention in my book: Metropolitan College at 1010 Commonwealth Avenue. This adult and continuing education center was an eye-opener for me, on two counts: It occupies a building I had profiled for Banker & Tradesman when it was renovated as office space before BU acquired it. It also contains a design masterwork by my old firm, The Galante Architecture Studio (TGAS). In fact, I didn't know until now that this TGAS creation was situated in this very building, though I had been familiar with both this building and this design for a long time.
The building itself, according to my research, was first built c.1919 by the Young Realty Company for a variety of mercantile purposes, as part of the "Automobile Row" of auto showrooms, auto-parts retailers and service stations that characterized that stretch of Commonwealth Avenue at the time. Designed in a standard commercial industrial style by Stebbins & Watkins, with a pair of Art Deco ornaments below its roofline that were apparently flagpole-holders, No. 1010 housed a United States Veterans Bureau vocational school and the McKenzie Engraving Company in its early years. In 1942, during World War II, the Massachusetts State Police set up its headquarters there, having been forced out of Commonwealth Pier in the future Seaport by the U.S. Navy. By 1962, the lot in front of the headquarters was an extension of the car lot of Ford dealers Coombs & McBeath next door (above), in the spirit of Commonwealth Avenue's Automobile Row.
After the State Police vacated No. 1010 in 1994 and the Commonwealth sold it off as surplus property in 2001-2002, it was renovated and expanded for general office use, as I reported in Banker & Tradesman. Its tenants included Fidelity Capital Markets, the Commonwealth's Criminal History Systems Board, the insurance giant Aetna, the TV company Bunim Murray Productions, and BU's own Sloane Epidemiology Center. BU acquired the property around 2011, making it the headquarters of its Metropolitan College in 2018. TGAS completed its lobby renovation and distinctive ceiling-lighting design in 2019.
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| Lever House (1952), 390 Park Avenue, New York, 1950s |
The firm's innovative sculptural approach to ceiling lighting is best appreciated in the context of the history of modern office lighting in general. When Lever House shook up New York's classical brick-and-stone-scape with the shock of the new in '52, it proclaimed its futuristic intentions inside as well, with a ubiquitous fluorescent lighting system that illuminated workspace equally day and night at a lower utility cost, while creating "vanishing points" of light-lines that dramatized the space.
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| Manufacturers Trust Building (1954), 510 5th Ave. @ W. 43rd St., New York. |
Architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill further grew the fluorescence into full-ceiling lighting in his Manfacturers Trust Building in 1954. In proper International Style, the building showcased its lighting on its glass-curtain-wall exterior, inviting the public inside to bank.
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| Still from The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder). |
This office lighting acquired profound symbolism in the movies. In Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960), its vanishing points give a sense of the selfsame "foreverness" of C.C. "Buddy Boy" Baxter's (Jack Lemmon) destiny to be forever stuck in the corporate contingent of conformity, uniformity and monotony, like his coworkers in his line.
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| Washington Post newsroom, pre-2015 (their vacancy year). |
In the newsroom of the Washington Post, a Hollywood Burbank Studios reconstruction of which provided the setting for Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976), these vanishing points of light conveyed the continuity of the news phoned in, ticker-taped and typed out minute-by-minute; the never-ending free exchange of scoops among reporters, editors and leads; and the no-end-in-sight development of the Watergate scandal and its continuous unraveling at the hands of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, which would eventually force Nixon to resign the presidency.
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| Union Carbide Building (1960-2021), New York, in the 1960s. |
In New York's Union Carbide Building, ceiling fluorescence reached its fullest capacity as an overhead of "day-light" that guided us seamlessly from the outdoor plaza to the indoor offices. Co-designed by Bunshaft and Natalie De Blois of SOM in 1960, it was the setting for David Swift's film How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967), symbolic of its lead's seamless path from windowwasher to Board Chairman.
The building was sadly demolished in 2021, the tallest voluntarily razed building in the U.S. so far.
In their lighting of Metropolitan College, TGAS used neither a straight-as-an-arrow nor a full-squared design like its predecessors, but a perpendicular tubular one with the maze-like movement of an abstraction of maps of the street grid and the subway system that lead commuters to the school, and subsequently through the space. This ceiling invites us inside with a more labyrinthine continuity to a vanishing point, welcoming us in to browse and traverse the lobby as an artful introduction to the continuing education we would receive there and a logical sense of direction toward our academic and vocational future. "It unfolds and pushes the visitor in through spaces,” said Founding Principal Ted Galante on the TGAS website.
Ted went on to say that this map-like ceiling was inspired by one in the Cranbrook Academy of Art, his alma mater. “That ceiling relates very strongly to the portico of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, designed by Eliel Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a higher education institution with hieroglyphics on the ceiling that connects art and the library," he said on the website. 
The lighting's linear construction ushers us across the space and breaks it up, leading the eye in many directions to introduce us to the wide variety of spatial, social and academic experiences the BU Metropolitan College spaces offer people of all ages and backgrounds, as opportunities to go in new educational and vocational directions. This is an imaginative use of light as a guiding light, rather than a mere illumination of an office space or a mirror of the monotony of the space and its routine, as expressed in The Apartment. The BU Metropolitan College lobby ceiling I discovered by chance that night is yet another result of the creative process of prototyping, model-making and experimentation that evolves each TGAS design into a pragmatically yet aesthetically satisfying creation (see my previous post on other TGAS work).
Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!
Sources:
"The Apartment," Wikipedia, last edited on 22 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apartment
"270 Park Avenue (1960-2021)," Wikipedia, last edited on 25 September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/270_Park_Avenue_(1960%E2%80%932021)
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