ArchiTalk

Googie gone for good, but Caribbean culture conserved

2011-05-11T11:24:00.001-07:00

"Googie" architecture — that sleek, streamlined silverstreak style of neonic eyepop associated with the space-age spirit of the '50s and '60s — does indeed feel like an extraterrestrial alien in colonially correct Boston. Brick walls, granite blocks, wood clapboards, slate gables, French mansard roofs, Greek temple fronts and Italianate porticoes simply don't click with the character of this architecture-as-advertising, where acrobatic geometrics, circusy silliness, eye-catching iconography, gargantuan neon script or backlit block lettering captivate the driver-by with an in-your-face enticement to stop. Shop. Eat. Drink. Play. Buy. Here. Now.

Yet, by comparison, Googie's out-of-this-worldliness does make it appear out-of-the-ordinary. And as it evolves through time from an eyefeast of the now to an eyesore of the past to an icon of its era, this commercial/retail quasi-kitsch of the Las Vegas/Route 66 breed has a way of growing on us.

Especially when its days are numbered.

Such is the case for Hi-Lo Foods in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood. This rare relic of the postwar period of sensationalist signage tacked onto a simple store structure — a "decorated shed," in architect Robert Venturi's words — is soon to be replaced with the generically wholesome Whole Foods Market, which also means outsville for the Caribbean grocery offerings unique to the community.

Learning from Las Vegas

Hi-Lo seems to have picked up pointers from the hard-not-to-spot sign that still entices motorists into The Strip in spirit and style as well as signification and orientation. The frame-backed space-star is there, as are the block letters on white, their encapsulation into individual shapes, and the use of chevrons for dramatic emphasis.

A beanstalk grows in Beantown

2011-05-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

The "sliver" building, the real estate developer's attempt to eke out as much square footage as possible from a tight footprint, has been a bumper-crop staple of New York City real estate for decades, owing to the overdevelopment on the tight little island of Manhattan that forces developers to build up when they can no longer build out. Hence the sliver building's tendency to sprout like weeds wherever the parcel-pollen happens to land, with a there-goes-the-neighborhood kind of shadowy dominion over whatever it happens to be dwarfing. Nonetheless, it has garnered certain mass market appeal for the city views it inevitably commands so high up, despite its ensuing vulnerability to high winds, seismic activity, and close encounters of the Sept. 11th kind.

But who would have thought these New York Neanderthals would make their way into Boston's historically low landscape? Then again, the Hub's winding and narrow streets and rising real estate values make for some pretty dinky parcels too.

Remember this? (Hint: JFK Jr. worked out here)

2011-05-11T11:23:00.001-07:00

And so did I, which is why I remember it well. But if you don't, no worries, for it's gone the way of JFK & Son.

Anchoring the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 85th St. in New York City's ethnic enclave of Yorkville, this mixed-use building was known by many names: the New York Turn-Verein, NYTV for short, Turn Hall, or Jaeger House. Downstairs was Adolf Jaeger Jr.'s restaurant, where locals quaffed Jakob Ruppert's Knickerbocker beer eins, zwei, g'suffa and devoured sauerkraut-slathered bratwurst, knackwurst and wienerschnitzel by the kilo. Upstairs was the great gymnasium/ assembly hall/auditorium, where the Turn-Verein, German for "gymnastics club," ran just that — and where I had the privilege of tumbling and tussling on the mat with John F. Kennedy Jr. when I was 6 and he was 7.

The old building's lavish admixture of Georgian and German décor, capped by an urn-topped crest reminiscent of the crown of the Brandenburg Gate, dispels its role as the central gathering place for New York's German-American community for workouts, Turner shows, assemblies, dances, you name it. The storefronts are as humble as the immigrants' beginnings in the New World, but the ornament on the upper floors signify the importance of the space inside, the rich aspirations of the new American citizens, and the fortitude of the Turners that taught and took gym up there. The tall trio of arched windows show that it contained all the light, space and headroom necessary for a good bodybuild, pole-vault, rope-climb or pyramid formation.

Revisiting Boston Garden (or the memories thereof)

2011-05-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

Boston Garden, 1994. Photo by Steve Lipofsky, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Talking about a historic landmark that's no longer standing has its challenges — both for me, as a Super Duck Tours first mate and tour guide, in terms of inculcating images of the history it made and the space it created upon my duckboat tour guests, and for them, in terms of imagining such high-energy happenings and history-in-the-makings when the real image-maker has gone to meet its Maker.

Grand Union

Arguably the Boston Garden was several notches below the institution it replaced in terms of architectural distinction.

Too visually rich for it to be worthy of replacement.

Three-in-one

But one must commend its replacement for being a more unified composition than its predecessor. Hotel, train station and sports arena are presented as one homogeneous block, clad in the same tan-yellow brick and Art Deco accents, as a city center of afternoon arrival, evening entertainment, night nesting and dawn departure. Though train station and arena are under one tent, each element is individually expressed by the covered walkway arcade, for going in to the shelter of the train; by the opaque blue-glass windows, expressing the vertical volume and sheer space of the interior yet signifying it as an escape into entertainment from the world around you. The hotel is separate but equal in its co-creation of this exciting urban center.

Boxer's big top

Originally built as a boxing arena, the Garden certainly pandered to the mass appeal of boxing by opening it up to bigger throngs with a larger volume of stadium seating all around. Of course, the boxing ring and many of the surrounding seats had to give way to the Parquet Floor that was essential to the Boston Celtics basketball team and the ice rink without which the Boston Bruins hockey team could not skate, score or scuffle.

Purple mountain majesty

Minus the cigarette smoke signals, the Garden commanded a majestic presence in its North End/West End neighborhood, unifying the two as a central place for people of all nations, neighborhoods and niches to go and enjoy all kinds of events for all kinds of tastes. Thus it loomed over both neighborhoods like a mountain range, its deep purplish-blue windows boldly expression the vertical volume and sheer space inside.

Thanks for the memories...

...but no thanks. Memories cannot be truly relived when their maker is mortalized. Simon & Garfunkel put it better: "Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you." So did Joni Mitchell: "We don't know what we got 'til it's gone. Paved paradise, put up a parking lot."

Which was just what they did...

Little boxes on the hillside...

2011-05-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

...but Pete Seeger would be wrong to say these ones are "all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." No, this time the topography defines the boxology, in proper Roxbury fashion.

This contemporary condominium on Fisher Avenue in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood is the closest thing to a "Roxbury style" I've ever seen, taking full advantage of the area's characteristically hilly terrain to evolve as a series of stepped dwelling units leading up to a "lookout" tower room at its pinnacle. Thus each level's setback along the upward bound hill yields each unit (or story, in the uppermost unit's case) a terrace from the roof of the lower unit or the ground-level garages, which comprise the first floor so that they don't intrude upon any unit's living space with exhaust odors or car motor noise. This multilevel arrangement allows each unit a great hillside view, and each level is jogged out in a zigzag form to allow it multiple sides of exposure, hence more light inside.

This creative configuration gives the entire complex a jagged, asymmetrical form that emerges as a geometric abstraction of the randomly craggy Roxbury puddingstone that characterizes this neck of the woods. This conglomerate stone, seen here in Roxbury's preserved Rockledge Urban Wild, is an aggregate of many different kinds of rocks, stones and pebbles bonded together by prehistoric volcanic and glacial action, forming the bedrock underlying the bulk of Roxbury, as well as parts of Brighton, Brookline, Canton, Dedham, Dorchester, Dover, Jamaica Plain, Milton, Needham, Newton and Quincy.

'Of the hill'

Of course, the greatest hill-house of all is Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. Far from the run-of-the-mill of little boxes on the hillside, this nature-inspired masterpiece of organic architecture comprises big slabs on the cliffside, cantilevering over the waterfall below them in a visually precarious posture — albeit in a geometrically ordered programme that reflects the machine age as well as nature's way.

Man and nature are both at odds and in détente here, and the structural assuredness of the balcony slabs is counterbalanced by the unpredictability of their built-to-last claim, appearing ready to cascade down the rocky waterfall on a moment's notice as the water gradually erodes the rock into the soil from which all came.

The stair towers are built of local stacked stone as a monument to the nature that made all things and a contrast to the man-madeness of the concrete that cast the slabs.

Fallingwater, built in 1934 for business tycoon Edgar Kaufmann, epitomizes Wright's prescription for all houses:

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

— Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (1932)

The Great 'Pieramid' of Tampa

2011-05-09T16:45:00.000-07:00

Photo by Texx Smith, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

For Pete’s sake!

What’s that at the end of the pier?

A Key West-bound cruise ship?

A Disney theme park?

Alien spacecraft?

Expo 2011?

No, it’s The Pier itself.

Pete's Pier

Courtesy www.terraceparksuites.com/about-st.-pete.html

The St. Petersburg Pier, that is — Tampa Bay’s signature icon, a monumental gateway to (and getaway from) its namesake city. Anchoring the end of a mile-long wharf approach from downtown St. Pete, this colossal inverted pyramid combines shopping, dining, fishing, boating, an aquarium, festivals, live entertainment and much more on five floors of Florida family fun.

Sittin' on the dock of the Bay

Courtesy www.planetware.com/picture/st-petersburg-st-petersburg-pier-us-fla393.htm

Courtesy www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotos-g34607-w2-St_Petersburg_Florida.html

The fun begins right on the dock, where you can take in the Tampa Bay view, go on a boatride or dolphin watch, pedal a surrey bicycle along the waterfront, take a horse-drawn carriage ride into the city, feed the pelicans, or fish for amberjack, flounder, sea bass, shark or snook with poles and bait from The Pier Bait House (right), a roof-tiled remnant of The Pier’s 1926 predecessor.

Canopy to culture and cuisine

Courtesy www.gourmetgirlmagazine.com/casualdiningspotlight.php

The Pier’s grand entrance canopy introduces a tourist information desk and 16 specialty shops selling candles, collectibles, crafts, fashions, jewelry and more.

The Dockside Eatery food court offers a smorgasbord of fast food, including Burger Bay, Cara’s Pizza, Hong Kong, and 41 ice cream flavors at Cones on The Pier.

Al's alcove

Courtesy inkwatu.com/2008/08/06/st-petersburg-pier/

At Captain Al's Waterfront Bar & Grill, you’ll be sittin’ on the dock of the bay enjoying all-American cuisine in your choice of indoor seating, the outdoor patio or the tikki bar area, hearing live bands on the Waterside Courtyard every weekend.

The Dockside Activity Room holds an Oldies But Goodies Dance the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month, and hosts such local acts as the SunCoast Band.

Fish tank, fish taste

Courtesy inkwatu.com/2008/08/06/st-petersburg-pier/

Upstairs is the Pier Aquarium, where a $5 admission ($4 for students and seniors, free for children under 7) lets you gaze at a colorful collection of native and tropical fish in a 2,000-square-foot tank.

Restaurants for all tastes comprise the pyramid’s upturned “base,” which cantilevers outward for the ultimate on-the-bay dining experience at:

Cha Cha Coconuts Tropical Bar & Grill, featuring Bahamian conch fritters;

Columbia Restaurant, where the Tampa Bay panorama complements the Spanish/Cuban fare;

Fresco's Waterfront Bar & Grill, serving Mediterranean cuisine in a suitable seaside setting.

Pier's precedents

The Pier originated in 1889, when the Orange Belt Railway built the Railroad Pier on Tampa Bay, three years before St. Petersburg’s incorporation as a city. An immediate success, the Railroad Pier was replaced in 1906 with the Electric Pier, which extended 3,000 feet into the bay and dazzled tourists and locals with its theatrical night lighting. This gave way to the Municipal Pier in 1914. When the Hurricane of 1921 damaged it, the city appropriated a $1 million bond for a...

Million Dollar Pier

Inaugurated on Thanksgiving Day in 1926, this Mediterranean-style palace boasted an open-air ballroom with rooftop terrazzo floors, an observation deck, and a grand central atrium for all sorts of community events, including card games, fishing tournaments and singalongs. Its grand portico became WSUN-TV’s studios, from which “Captain Mac” broadcast his children’s show in the 1950s. Fallen into disrepair, the Million Dollar Pier was razed in 1967.

Tubular!

Courtesy inkwatu.com/2008/08/06/st-petersburg-pier/

The St. Petersburg Pier, opened to the public in January 1973, was designed by William B. Harvard Sr., founder of Harvard Jolly Architecture, with a tubular steel framework to create large windows for copious sunlight and bay views, and an inverted pyramid form to maximize the top floor area and observation deck.

Southern nights

Courtesy www.flickr.com/photos/rvs3designs/4203478639/

This offbeat design enables The Pier to continue its predecessors’ traditions of providing plentiful space for private and public functions, offering Tampa Bay’s most breathtaking observation point, letting patrons dance the night away, and electrifying the bay’s night sky and clear waters with colorful lighting and fireworks.

Snow: architecture's arbiter and advocate

2011-01-18T13:16:00.000-08:00

The Big Blizzard of 1/11/11 clearly demonstrated a characteristic property of snow: its ability to give buildings new form. It does this not merely by leaving its snow-white imprint on them, but by accenting and accentuating the distinctive forms the buildings already possess as it brings their reliefs into further relief.

By outshining its burial victims with its sheer whiteness, snow prompts us to take fuller notice of them in the context of the familiar visual beauty of the White Christmases we dream of and the Winter Wonderlands we're happy to walk in. Thus snow can be three things to architecture. It can be a standard by which to judge a building's innate architectural merit, an enhancer of an edifice's existing merit, or an awarder of new merit to a structure easily overlooked in the off-season.

Take, for instance, the Greek Evangelical Church (1902, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, left) and Trinity Episcopal Church (1916, George W. Chickering, below) in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. Their snow-blanketed landscape heightens the holiness their architects intended them to convey to the public, given the color white's association with purity, holiness and cleanliness in the Bible:

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
— Psalms 51:7

His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow.
— Matthew 28:3

O how glorious is the kingdom wherein all the saints rejoice in Christ.
Clothed in white robes they follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth...
— Revelation 7:9,12

Architecturally, the snow's accumulation on the churches' prominent Gothic elements forces us to see them in a more monumental light. Newly cloaked in white, Battlement, Buttress, Crocket, Finial, Lady Chapel, Lancet Arch and Ridge are now brought out in full force, as the architectural symbols of God's followers, perfectly regimental, not straying from the flock.

Here are more examples of snow falling afresh on buildings in Newton:

Baptized in snow

The blizzard brought out the Richardsonian Romanesque features of the First Baptist Church in Newton (1888, John Lyman Faxon). As it accumulated on and in the crevices, fissures, pits and promontories of the craggy granite blocks, the rose window mullions, the sandstone relief carvings and the buttresses and gargoyles, it highlighted them, in the vein of the bare suggestions of bricks, stones and ornaments that were typically drawn in a turn-of-the-century architectural rendering. We thus see the trees for the forest more clearly and get a rudimentary architectural education in the process. The white spots also add a fourth dimension to the already three-dimensional effect of the church's asymmetrical composition. As the snow melts, it becomes the true fourth dimension — time — that causes the parts to diminish into the whole once again when winter passes into spring.

The Polar Express

"Eyelid" dormers, high hipped roofs and deep eaves characterize the Newton Centre MBTA Station (1892, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge), according to the master plan set forth for all such stations by the architects' predecessor, Henry Hobson Richardson.

However, the blizzard's "snowbrow" effect gives the eyelids actual eyebrows, the roofs a snowy mountain presence, and the eaves the feel of a cozier shelter from the snow. Therefore, the Richardsonian roof form is stronger and bolder.

Alpine altitude

Here the snow has encrusted thickly on the Queen Anne house's super-steep roof, as well as its towering evergreen, its high hillside terrain and its surrounding tree branches and bushes. Even its telephone wire has caught some of the white stuff, in the tubular fashion of a corn dog. All of these elements give the house's high-pitched roof gable the suggestion of the steep soar of a ski slope in the Swiss Alps. The snow-wrapped wire adds the tensile "ski lift" or "cable car" effect that is most familiar in the Alps.

With the enrichment of snow, the house's architectural, natural and utilitarian features collectively convey the mixed emotions and effects of scenic serenity, mountain awe and fear of heights we may experience while traveling, skiing or chair-lifting in the Alpine mountains.

Queen Anne is truly the "Snow Queen" and the "Mountain King" here.

River deep, mountain high

Just when the geometric modernist style of the inverse hipped roof of this 1960s Brimmer and May School building was no longer hip, along came the snow to cast it in a fresh mold. Now the gym's up-cornered eaves and central pyramid crown abstract the triangular forms of a range of snow-capped mountains, enabling the building to spread its wings and soar again on the skyscape. The frozen downspout at the "river valley" adds a waterfall effect to the building's new-found naturalism, which is enhanced by the original pebble-pressed skin and the newer forest-green paint job.

Medieval mystique

The snowy landscape, the snow-seasoned evergreens, and the bulbous snow-topped bell tower give the Chestnut Hill School the wintry wonderment of a medieval clockmaker's village. The mountain-peak gables express the spirit of the surrounding woods in their half-timbering, and the clustering of buildings articulates the interactive community nature of the school's program, according to its mission: "Within an active community of students, faculty, and families, The Chestnut Hill School promotes respect between individuals and involvement with the larger community." Snow magnifies this community spirit by making the buildings seem more closely huddled together for warmth from the cold.

Get a horse!

Clearly modeled on carriage barns of yore, this gabled wooden garage with iron-hinged exposed- wood doors seems to call for a horse, rather than a car, to complete the Currier-and-Ives image of a quaint old New England barn the snowfall has given it, in the vein of Jingle Bells: "Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh."

Fire and ice

This brief detour into Cambridge shows how snow can clarify the use of a particular building, here the fire station in Central Square. By clinging to the bell tower, the snow not only makes this Italianate campanile more monumentally visible at night — like the headlights, siren and white hood of the fire engine dashing through the snow — but also broadcasts the intent of the building's occupant: to freeze a fire. Thus the tower stands as a symbol of the clarity of cold water quenching the brick-red of hot flame.

Hot spot

Likewise (back in Newton), here the snow amplifies the advertising and the awning, which are to this eatery as the bell tower is to the fire station in terms of the most prominent, self-promoting elements. These contrasts of cold snow with hot pizza and snowy awning with dry shelter entice us to come in out of the cold for something hot — that is, if we can get past the white mountain that blocks the way. Furthermore, here is an example of how snow ornaments an ordinary building to give it more visual depth. By accenting a common sign to give its black relief lettering another dimension, the snow creates a black-and-white contrast that fittingly symbolizes the hot-and-cold one that will hopefully lure business in the colder months. Also, the dark canopy is encloaked in white for a kindler, gentler invitation into the warm shelter of a pizza shop.

White-bread blandness

But snow has limited effect on a building of limited architectural distinction to begin with. White-upon-white lacks the contrast necessary to produce the tension of opposites that creates visual interest. Also, this mid-20th-century split level's functionalistic, built-on-a-budget design has no ornament for snow to enhance and make prettier — unlike the elaborate Italianate Victorian in the background, where the mansard roof, the elaborate dormers and other ornamentation become "snow-peaks" as they catch the snow in the open air.

White beauty

But snow has a more enlightening effect on this late 19th-century white house. The wood shingles, bay window, bracketed hood, and roofed porches with exposed rafters and cross-stick rails animate the facade to contrast the uniform whiteness the snow has brought, which itself stands out with angelic purity against the ominously dark trees and deep blue sky.

White House

Of course, the white of the snow augments the White House image this grand Georgian Revival mansion projects with its classically columned, balustrade-topped porch-in-the-round similar to the one on James Hoban's famed Washington creation.

Earliest known photograph of the White House, taken c. 1846
by John Plumbe during the James Knox Polk administration.

Furthermore, the snow's clustering on the trees gives them the fluffy fullness and lily-white luster of the lilacs that blossom in springtime in Washington. And both, like the fame of most White House residents, are fleeting. One melts, the other sheds, and both are gone at the height of their appreciation.

White planes

This newcomer to Newton demonstrates the planar power of roofs when snow casts them into pure geometric forms. Now they are exhibited as a solid entity of shelter from the snow, not an aggregate of asphalt shingles, a run of rubber or a turf of tar-and-gravel.

Winter weathering

Snow can bring out the rugged and rustic as well as the rich and refined. This image epitomizes the quintessential New England barn in the winter, where the snow creates the same contrast between bright white and dark brown as it does on the tree bark on which it accumulates.

This makes the barn's wood shingles seem woodsier, more in the context of the source of their material. The effect also conveys the hardship of winter, the necessity to gather firewood for the warmth the unheated barn cannot give on its own. The quirky asymmetry of the barn allows the snow to form odd shapes as it falls on its diverse surfaces, just like on the trees. The snow also gives the barn the sense of decay it goes through as winter upon winter, snow upon snow slowly returns its materials to the source from which they came.

Winter cottages

Here are examples of how snow can make sizable medieval-style houses appear more intimate by bringing out their iconic recollection of half-timbered cottages in the German or Swiss Alps or the Nordic regions of Scandinavia. Here the wooden timbers evoke the fuel that keeps us warm by the hearth in the winter, as well as the structure that supports and solidifies these shelters. The snow signifies the cold the woodburning fireplace protects us from, and the high gables symbolize the snow-peaked mountains of the European regions in which this style originated. Thus the houses appear warmer and more human-scaled when snowed upon, and even tempt us to seek shelter inside them.

Added value

Here the snow adds to the old-fashioned character with which the architects attempted to mollify the mall monotony of this chintzy chain-store — namely Consumer Value Stores (CVS) — and give it the feel of a friendly neighborhood drugstore and grocer. The pseudo-medieval aesthetics of broad hipped and humped roofs, deep bracketed overhangs, a crowning finial, red brickwork and Queen Anne-ish transoms try to recall Richardsonian depots like the one above, but come off as Howard Johnson's roadside kitsch. However, the snow and icicles make the fakery a shade better by masking the asphalt shingles with a temporary winter-cottage charm. And this does entice the consumer in from the cold to stock up on the Campbell's, the Contac, the Kleenex and the Vicks for the winter. Like Café Nicholas above, snow has advertising power here.

Snow sculpture

Snow can add to a house's ornamentation and thus draw more attention to its style. Here the snow happened to melt in the form of the "broken pediment" that's common in the neo-Georgianism this house typifies. The new "ornament" lines up almost centrally with the peaked dormer and curved pediment, for a fuller Georgian effect from top to bottom.

As it melts and detaches itself from the balcony rail of this Queen Anne home, the snow becomes a decorative "banner," like the white part of the red, white and blue banners that emblazon house railings on July 4. Here's how architecture sculpts snow with no helping hands.

Likewise with these "snowballtops," which needed no hands to add this touch of colonial class to common picket fence posts. Part of this class is the contrast between the roundness of the balls and the squareness of the posts the snowfall has created.

In addition to adding sculpture to structure, snow can augment the sculptural qualities a structure already has. The "humping" of snow on this unusual octagonal stone wall sets up contrasts between white snow and dark stone and between rounded and flat, squared surfaces. Like a round scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of a brown wafer cone, this effect animates the wall with a higher third dimension. This contrast also brings out the stone octagon's linear geometry by making its darkness more visible to us against the white of the snow, whether in light or in shadow.

Clapboard clarity

Here, snow collects in the pattern of a house's exterior treatment and puts it in higher relief. At sundown, when the sun no longer clarifies the clapboards through light and shadow, snow takes over that role. Sun and snow may be hot-and- cold competitors, but here they perform compatible roles in bringing out a facade's architectural attributes.

Mansard magic

Icicles dangling from gabled or hipped roofs are nothing new under the sun, but the mansard roof isn't hip to that trend. Invented by the French to reshape the roof into a full level of living with no attic rafters to bump your head on (and no taxes to pay on that level, according to theory), the mansard intercepts the icicles as the snow melts off the upper hip. This forces them to run down the steeper slope, freeze on it in interesting patterns (here the ice congeals on the fish-scale shingles, giving them some of the metallic sheen of actual fish scales when the sun hits them), and thus disperse on their way down so the icicles thin out at the bottom eaves. In this way, the mansard's steep slope acts as a safety shield against icicles getting too long and heavy and posing a hazard to unsuspecting heads. In both headroom and heads-up, the mansard is the best headgear since the hockey helmet.

Time of the season

This image of Crystal Lake on the cusp of the Winter Solstice (my holiday e-card this season) shows time's passage from the colors of fall to the cool of winter. The houses and their occupants enjoy their last impressions of bare-bones building and their last breaths of milder climate before Old Man Winter engulfs them in a cloak of cold such as the one on 1/11/11.

Homeward bound

I'll conclude my saunter through snowstyles with this image of my snowbound home. The snow accents the eave and gutter lines, the roof planes, the porch edges and the stone retaining wall, making each element more distinct and noticeable.

So, what can we conclude about snow's effect on architecture? In general, as oxygen supports combustion but does not burn, and as clothes and blankets contain body heat without actually giving us any, snow brings out and augments a structure's existing, inherent and unique qualities without giving it any quality it does not already have. With few exceptions, snow can't give what architecture hasn't got.

Boston Un-Common

2010-12-13T06:56:00.000-08:00

"View of the Water Celebration, on Boston Common, October 25th 1848." Lithograph by P. Hyman and David Bigelow. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

When was the last time a monumental display on the Boston Common was a crowd-alluring spectacle? This geyser-like fountain demo of the city's then-new water supply system assumed the awe-inspiring magnanimity of "Old Faithful" at Yellowstone Park as hundreds celebrated the accessibility of water to all, not just to the Beacon Street elite that had claimed the Common as their front lawn.

Since then we've taken water's everywhereness for granted, be it from fountain, faucet or fire hydrant. The same goes for the Common's other monumental presences, now that the crowd-catching ceremonies of their dedications have long passed. They've become commonplace to us as we scurry by them like the squirrels to get to and from work, home, shopping or nightlife. We don't stop to contemplate their aesthetic contribution to the Common or muse about the historical events or personages their designers wanted us to remember.

A recent walk through the Boston Common and Public Garden with some friends drew my photographic attention to these overlooked monuments, plaques, statues and outbuildings. So here are my memorial mementos:

Common's commencement

What better place to begin memorial-meandering than at the Blackstone Memorial Tablet, designed in 1913 by R. Clipston Sturgis. The inscription is from an 1864 deposition by four of the Town of Boston's last surviving residents, commonly cited as proof that the people of Boston are the Common's rightful owners. In brief, Boston's first settler, William Blaxton, a.k.a. Blackstone, was feeling crowded by Gov. John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Company settlement, so in 1634 he sold his 50-acre estate to the town and moved to Rhode Island. The town (not yet a city) deeded the land exclusively for the residents' common use, which included military training, cattle-grazing, promenading, horseback riding, dueling and public hanging. In 1660, the Puritans hanged Mary Dyer here for preaching Quakerism. In 1775, British troops encamped here before departing for the Battle of Lexington and Concord that ignited the Revolutionary War.

The dedication of Charles Bulfinch's new Massachusetts State House in 1795 initiated residential development all around the Common, including Beacon Street, Bulfinch's Park Row on Park Street, and his Colonnade Row along Tremont Street. By 1820, the Common resembled an English landed estate with its rolling hills, narrow paths and tree groves, and every Boston family could graze one cow there. Land value, cow manure and labor issues prompted a citizens' petition to remove the cows, which was done in 1830, inspiring Oliver Wendell Holmes to proclaim the Boston Common "a sacred enclosure."

This was confirmed by the 1836 erection of an ornamental iron fence around the Common. From then on, its sacred cows were its iron, bronze and stone monuments, statues and plaques sacred to the memory of people, places and events, sprouting sporadically in the space over the decades.

Field and fountain

Among the first was a more creative use of water. Boston dry-goods merchant Gardner Brewer donated this fountain in 1868. It was cast in Paris as a copy of a fountain sculpted by Liénard for Paris's Exposition Universelle de 1855, where it won a gold medal.

The 22-foot, 15,000-pound Brewer Fountain is a splendid blend of architecture and sculpture, where statues become supporting elements. A cluster of cherubs upholds the top basin, from which the water trickles down to the middle basin and spouts out through winged scallops into the pool. Anchoring the base under the middle basin's umbrella are mythological images of Neptune, Roman god of water and sea; Greek sea goddess Amphitrite; Acis, spirit of Acis River, as extolled by Roman Poet Ovid; and Roman sea nymph Galatea. Like a Roman fountain, the spirit of water as a mobile object of beauty as well as a practical sustenance substance is exhibited with Beaux-Arts grandeur. And, like the Water Celebration of 1848, the Brewer Fountain is the Common's greatest people magnet, being a haven for performances, demonstrations, Bible readings and other crowd-drawers. Perhaps the fountain's visual richness, plaza presence and fluid, sonorous element — water — make the difference, unlike the quiet, aloof, stock-still monuments that are easier to overlook and bypass.

Mind, body and spirit...but is it art?

Perhaps ease of notice and incentive to stop and gather were motives for installing these statues as perimeter markers for Parkman Plaza — to place them in our path so we couldn't miss them while walking down Lafayette Mall along Tremont Street. Indeed, civic improvement of the mall was the city's main motivation behind this public art installation, as the Religion statue's base indicates at right:

PARKMAN PLAZA
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
GEORGE F. PARKMAN, 1823-1908
THROUGH WHOSE BENEFICENCE
LAFAYETTE MALL WAS IMPROVED
AND THIS PLAZA CREATED
1958-1960
HON. JOHN F. COLLINS
AND
HON. JOHN B. HYNES
MAYORS OF BOSTON

To be sure, architects Shurcliffe & Merrill and sculptors Adio Dibiccari and Angelo Cascieri had the best of intentions for the plaza and its statues: to inspire the cultivation of the three chief areas of human development — Learning, Industry, Religion — in our children. But conversation pieces they're not, by virtue of their then-faddish, streamlined Art Moderne style. This makes them no aesthetic match for either the Brewer Fountain or Parkman's earlier classical legacy, the Bandstand, described below. Harsh, heavy geometry and clichéd symbolism (the book, the globe, the chisel, the dodecahedron, the prayerful heavenward gaze, the wavy filler beneath) makes these figures too banal to motivate us to stop and contemplate them — unlike the fountain, which keeps our eyes moving along the sensually curved, delicately detailed, biologically nuanced bodily forms of its sculptures.

Furthermore, squaring off Parkman Plaza is a fourth base with no statue (as if Parkman's endowment had run out). This makes the entire composition lopsided and unbalanced, with no four-corner completion to formally define the plaza as a public gathering space. Hence the absence of crowds.

Tremont's tragedy

Nor do Tremont's unsightly buildings improve Lafayette Mall, as the Religion photo above shows. Colonnade Row provided a refined architectural framework for appreciating the Common's beauty, like an ornamental frame around a painting, when it lined the street from 1811 until progress nibbled away at it, leveling its last remnants in the '60s and '70s.

The row's replacements are, by and large, horrendous hulks of condo commercialism that grant their inhabitants pretty bird's-eye views of the Common but give us onlookers added incentives to walk on by.

Tremont's treasure

All that remains of Tremont Street's heyday is the classically columned St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, where I had the privilege of singing in a boys' choir in the 1970s. Built in 1820 from a Greek Revival design by Quincy Market's architect, Alexander Parris, St. Paul's is now upstaged and overshadowed by latter-day office and apartment blocks. Hence this buried treasure stands as a memorial to Tremont Street's fall from grace, straining, like the Common's memorials, to be noticed.

Lafayette's languor

Lafayette Mall's namesake was none other than the Marquis de Lafayette, a major general in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and a patriot of the French Revolution of 1789 in his native nation. During his 1824 visit to Boston, he walked along what was then the Common's Tremont Street Mall, attracting fervent crowds. The following year, he laid the cornerstone of Charlestown's Bunker Hill monument on June 17, the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. In honor of his visit, the mall was informally called "Fayette Place" for 12 years after. It was formally rechristened Lafayette Mall after the 1895 completion of the Park Street Subway (America's first) running under Tremont Street, to bring historical dignity to the subway's right-of-way after its cut-and-cover disruption of the Common. This 1924 plaque commemorates the centennial of the Marquis' mall march. Then, Tremont Street looked something like this:

What a difference 86 years make. The grass plots along the Common's curb back then provided a pastoral context for Lafayette Mall, and the buildings were statelier at the time, yet auguries of the chockablock high-rise commercial, residential and institutional development to come. Today the Marquis would be gratified by the preservation of Peter Banner's 1810 Park Street Church but aghast at the disappearance of the slender porch columns, sunny brick facades and black louver shutters of the residential row that had enriched the history he had made during his promenade along the Colonnade. (He looks pretty disgruntled on his plaque.)

Bland Barry

Here's a pathetic example of how memorials were beginning to resemble tombstones by mid-century, when expediency was replacing artistry in their creation, as in the Parkman Plaza statuary. Commodore John Barry is given a shallow, sketchy treatment unbecoming of his distinction as the U.S. Navy's first commander in 1798. In this bas-relief context his armless "bust" effect is uncalled for, with no pedestal or in-the-round stature to justify it. At least it's fairly complete with the details of his military career. And Mayor James Michael Curley's desire to leave an imprint on his city by honoring a fellow Irish immigrant is understandable, even commendable. But one of Boston's most illustrious Irish is best remembered with a statue, not a stoneface. For the shoddy upkeep of this slab's grounds attests to how ignored it is — in contrast to the statues of Curley that command a prominent place near Faneuil Hall.

Dubious Declaration

I don't mean the Declaration of Independence itself, but this inept tribute to it, not to mention its questionable use to Tremont trekkers. The 1776 quill-pen calligraphy is hard enough to decipher, but this bronze casting of it makes the task more arduous. No wonder no one stops and stares here; clear parchment repros can be had by the bundle in souvenir shops. Nor do the overhead clichés help any. The bas-relief is a retread of John Trumbull's all-too-familiar 1819 painting of, not the actual signing as commonly believed, but the drafting committee (John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin) presenting their draft of the Declaration to Continental Congress President John Hancock (being a Bostonian, maybe he's the reason for this plaque) on June 28, 1776. The wingspread eagle crest is triteness trumpeted as heraldry — we get that image daily on the dollar bill!

At least Hancock's John Hancock comes out clearly enough, as he intended it to when he signed big and bold, allegedly so King George III could read it without his glasses and see the seriousness of his colonies' intent. But haven't we had more than our share of this icon, too? (After all, it's the namesake of New England's tallest tower, which we cannot escape the sight of no matter where we are in Boston.)

Massacre magnified

Now here's something three-dimensional, original, unique to Boston, and commemorative of its Commoners. Honoring the five who fell to British bullets by the Old State House on March 5, 1770 — Crispus Attucks, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, Samuel Gray and Patrick Carr — the Boston Massacre Memorial, designed by Robert Kraus, was erected in 1888. The chain- and flag- bearing female figure borne on eagle-wings symbolizes Revolution breaking the chain of British tyranny ("breaking" is right, considering what vandals have done to it over time). In doing so, this memorial breaks the mold cast by those we saw just prior by making finesse out of victims rather than flatness out of victors. The cylindrical form of the obelisk bucks its own trend, that of the squared- off Egyptian model used for the Bunker Hill Monument (1843), the Washington Monument (1885) and the towers of the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge (2003).

Parkman's pantheon

George F. Parkman was the son of landowner/ physician George Parkman, who donated the land for the original Harvard Medical College and endowed Harvard's Parkman Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology (held 1847-1882 by Oliver Wendell Holmes).

Upon George Sr.'s grisly murder and dismemberment by Harvard Medical College Professor John Webster at the school in 1849, George Jr. inherited the family fortunes, out of which he willed a $5 million endowment for the upkeep of Boston's parks upon his own death in 1908. Here his legacy is given a more worthy treatment, aesthetically and functionally, than his namesake plaza. Designed by Derby, Robinson & Shephard, the Parkman Bandstand was built in 1912 on the site of the Common's old Cow Pond, which had been filled in following the cows' eviction in 1838. One-fifth of Parkman's cash cow went into this, and the results are worth it.

Greco-Roman classical details — Ionic columns with volute capitals, fan-leaf anthemions above each column, a dome recalling a Roman rotunda or Parthenon, a stepped plinth platform banded by a Greek key relief stringcourse — immediately catch the eye and beckon the onlooker with a traditional image of sculptural beauty that invites us to climb up its steps, stand in its space, and feel a few degrees richer and grander for the moment.

The bandstand's in-the-round stature has multiple advantages, as a space-definer, a place-enforcer, and an upholder of the democratic ideals that created the Common in the first place. The cylindrical space its columns create guide our eyes in a 360-degree rotation, giving us a panoramic view of the Common that make us more aware of our surroundings. We experience the same effect as we walk around the bandstand and observe the space through and alongside its column-formed space. Furthermore, its drum form assures sound travel in all directions and crowd attraction from all directions during a concert or rally.

Who goes there?

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Everybody goes to the Old Granary, King's Chapel and Copp's Hill burying grounds, because they're right smack on the tourist-familiar Freedom Trail. But the Central Burying Ground is less noticed, because its location isn't as central as its name suggests. It's shoved off in a far corner of the Common with less tourist traffic, by virtue of its busy intersection near the far more crowd-drawing theaters and bars, as well as its situation on the cusp of what had been Boston's Combat Zone adult entertainment and prostitution district for 30-odd years.

Photo by David Berkowitz

But this combat zone is worth a rediscovery, as "British soldiers who died of disease during the occupation of the city [1775-1776], and those who died of wounds received at Bunker Hill" are buried here, according to King's Hand-Book of Boston (1889).

Famous names interred here include William Billings, composer of the colonial hymn "Chester," and Gilbert Stuart, painter of the unfinished George Washington portrait that was the model for the dollar bill.

Like its Freedom Trail compatriots, the Central Burying Ground bespeaks an era when tombstone carving was an art form, not an automated fabrication like Commodore Barry's headstone above, or, sadly, like Gilbert Stuart's remembrance above right.

Mausoleum?

No, but you're warm, for it stands as a memorial to the lavatories it once housed. Its octagonal Jeffersonian style reflects the civic pride with which Boston used to infuse even its baser outbuildings. Plans to rehab this 1920s gem into a cafe are dead in the water as of now.

Garage grace

But not its influence, for this 1990s octagonal entry to the Boston Common Garage has clearly taken civic cues from the languishing latrine and brought dignity to our descent into the down-under parking. There may be new life in the old lav yet.

Subway sublime

Come to think of it, the Park Street Subway started the Common's tradition of making the middling monumental, as shown by the Grecian grace and grillwork architect Edmund March Wheelwright gave his Boylston and Park Street station entries in 1895.

The subway's vent shaft was given the visual distinction of a cupola or guardhouse to offset the vent's functional necessity and gritty unsightliness. The rock-faced granite stresses the structure's closure to the public while blending it with its natural environment. Completing the nature communion are the hipped roof's overhanging eaves, exposed rafters and bulbous copper finial, which mimic the shelter of the surrounding trees. In this way the roof reflects the coming influence of the Craftsman style and its back-to-basics, back-to-nature approach to architecture.

Slippery elm

A memorial to a person is "Common" practice, but a memorial to a tree is as uncommon as this particular species. The Great Elm, or Old Elm, stood here from Boston's Native American days (as the Shawmut Peninsula, prior to William Blaxton's settlement) until it was felled in the gale of 1876 — the centennial of our country, to its great misfortune. Since then, no one has dared plant a replacement, knowing full well it would never match the majesty of the original and would certainly not attain its height and limb-spread in our generations. So the New England Methodist Historical Society placed a plaque in its place, focusing our attention on Methodist pioneer Jesse Lee's homiletics under the tree in 1790, as well as the Sons of Liberty's assemblage under it as their second "Liberty Tree."

Unlike a statue's tendency to "take stage" away from its surroundings by commanding our attention (if we're open to it), this plaque effectively "gives stage" to the Great Elm's site, provoking us to imagine how awesome it must have been to previous generations. And, as these historical illustrations show, it was a prime example of the tree as monument: aware of its historical significance to Boston, it was fenced, flowered and pathwayed in to encourage people to appreciate it from a distance, like the statues and paintings we're ordered not to get too close to in a museum.

Also, in light of the Dutch elm disease that has caused more of its kind to slip away, the plaque also serves as a memorial to the Great Elm's fellow fallen. In this way, both the plaque and the vacant site serve as a reminder of how important trees in general are to our well-being, as shade-providers, crowd-gatherers, picnic-shelterers, cityscape beautifiers, and greenhouse-gas reducers. Like the vacant lot of a demolished historic building (particularly the plaqued site of the old John Hancock House beside the State House), we're forced to remember the significance of what we've lost.

Soldiers' sentinel

Of all the Common's structures, the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument atop Flagstaff Hill is the most sublime. But it is just as subliminal, being both hard and easy to overlook. Designed by Martin Milmore and dedicated on September 17, 1877, before a 25,000-strong throng that included Union Generals George B. McClellan and Joseph Hooker, this memorial to Massachusetts soldiers and sailors killed in the Civil War stands 126 feet from base to flagstaff, as the Boston Common's tallest structure. Its hilltop site elevates it further, so that the bronze allegorical female statue "America" atop its Doric victory column hardly goes unnoticed. But, even with her 13-star crown and her U.S. flag, laurel wreath and sword in hand, Miss America's peak presence fails to pique the public interest in the monument that was everpresent at its dedication. So here is my formal introduction to what is worth climbing the hill to see.

Carved in Hallowell white granite, the monument
boasts a battery of four 8-foot-high granite statues
anchoring the base of the laurel-banded column.
These robed figures represent the reunited nation's
northern, southern, eastern and western sections,
and face accordingly in those directions. Facing in
their directions gives you a greater appreciation of
the Common's landscape from its highest point.

The inscription on the base below the four figures, with sculptor credit below.

The second of the four bronze bas-relief panels, "The Sanitary Commission,"
depicts the medical care given to the soldiers on the battlefield.

In the fourth panel, "The Return from the War," a veterans' regiment march by the
Massachusetts State House to present their battle flags to Gov. John Albion Andrew.

On the laurel-wreathed corner bases stood bronze statues symbolizing Peace, History, The Army and The Navy, but deterioration and vandalism forced them to retreat into storage. Which only goes to show how important regular spectatorship of a park's monuments are to their public protection as well as one's personal enlightenment.

Time bomb

This industrial iron counterpoint to the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument's sculpted bronze/granite artistry really brings out the monumental in the mundane.

The sheer presence of this actual mine used in the U.S. Navy's strategic placement of a barrier of 56,571 mines in the North Sea during World War I evokes the tension, terror and turmoil of this unparalleled aquatic feat, the lives lost in its detonation, and the shell-shock of its survivors. This serves as a warning against future use of this weapon of mass destruction.

Dark as death, callous as a cannonball and threatening as a time bomb, this memorial was presented to the city by the North Sea Mine Force Association on October 26, 1921. Left in the rugged, rusty condition of its expended state with none of a typical monument's pomp and polish, it gives us an in-your-face demo of mine morbidity. (Maybe that's one reason few people ever come up here.)

Frog and Toad are friends...

...but no friends of mine. These cartoonish caricatures of the Frog Pond's namesake make a mockery of one of the Common's cherished community traditions, which has made summer splashing and winter skating available to generations of families from all five corners of the Common. They're cute for kids to climb on, but not for adults to appreciate as art. No better is Tadpole Playground, an overdone overkill of froggy folly and kiddie kitsch more suitable for a Chuck E. Cheese's pizza palace than a haven of history like the Boston Common. What was Mayor Menino thinking when he let this one hop in?

Lift up your heads, O ye gates

A tad above Tadpole's, these gates are a sanctified come-in to the Common from the busy Beacon-Charles crossing. The high, arch-paneled granite posts are crowned with the top-hat cordiality of welcoming doormen. The capped pylons serve as the "pages" that usher us in.

The cast-iron fences and posts unify the composition with a Victorian graciousness that makes Boston's commoners feel uncommon as they enter their park. (A twin of this arrangement once anchored the Common's opposite corner at Park and Tremont streets, but progress bulldozed it away. A shame; that even busier intersection could use the quieting grace of such an entrance.)

Winthrop's landing

Another stately passage between the Common and Beacon Hill, this memorial to John Winthrop's 1630 founding of Mass. Bay Colony is so centrally sited we are forced to notice it before exiting to Beacon Street through its post-flanked passages.

The granite/bronze memorial's axial symmetry with Phillips Street reinforces its monumentality and historical significance to the neighborhood while easing our transition to it, which is helped by the near-level alignment of Beacon Street with the Common's parallel path.

Thus the plaza is step-raised only slightly, providing a level landing to encourage us to stop and ponder the bronze bas-relief, which depicts Winthrop's company greeting the natives upon landing at the Shawmut Peninsula. Winthrop's friendly interaction with the natives parallels the Common's communion with Beacon Hill at this level.

Troublesome transition

But here's what happens when parallel lanes upgrade at varying degrees: a taxing transition between them. Thus the Guild Steps initiate Beacon's steepest over-the-hill undertaking — Joy Street's straight- up shoot to Mt. Vernon St. and straight-down drop to Cambridge St.

Built in 1917 in memory of Curtis Guild Jr., a three-time Massachusetts governor and an ambassador to Russia, the Guild Steps certainly provide an elegant entry or exit to Joy Street or the Common with their Grecian urn-topped posts, scrolled rails and lamp casings, all in proper Boston granite, cast-iron and gaslamp tradition. However, the challenge of the climb causes the memory of the namesake to get lost in the shuffle up the stairs. Besides, Curtis Guild Jr. was no John Winthrop in terms of gubernatorial eminence. So the memorial significance of the steps is easily overlooked when their practical use as steppingstones from point A to point B takes over our concern. Still, they do their best for us with the tough turf the topography gives them.

Shaw's shrine

However, the final stop on our monumental march through the Common is well worth its steep stair-climb: the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial. Unlike the bland backsides of most memorials, this one certainly piques public interest in what's on the other side with its patriotic parade of Roman grillwork rails, Grecian urns, wave moldings, laurel-wreath reliefs, carved eagles, roster of members of Col. Shaw's 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and lionhead fountains that haven't worked in years. So, up we go!

This 1897 masterpiece by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White brings the bas-relief out to statuary status with its full figures of Shaw and his regiment, the first company of free black to serve the Union in the Civil War. Saint-Gaudens nuanced all soldiers as individuals while emphasizing their collective mission under Shaw's center command.

In short, a union fighting for the Union. This unity is expressed by the soldiers' near-parallel muskets, their uniformly erect heads and forward-facing eyes — including the horse's — and their forward-march in one direction toward the common goal of defeating the Confederacy and freeing the slaves.

More than an artwork, the Shaw Memorial tops the Common's other monuments in civic responsibility. Architect Stanford White set the tableau back several feet from the street, creating a benched alcove for a roomier place to rest or wait for a carriage or bus than the narrow sidewalk could provide — a much-needed amenity at the busy Beacon and Park Street intersection. The English elms take up the slack from the Great Elm's loss, as shade-providers and unifiers of the monument with the Common. Furthermore, the memorial unifies the Common with the city as a smooth, graceful transition to it.

Those qualities, along with the monument's location on the Freedom Trail facing the State House and the familiarity of its image in the 1989 movie Glory, make the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial a more powerful crowd-magnet year-round than any other Boston Common memorial.

Garden of delights...and discoveries

2010-10-18T19:19:00.000-07:00

Photograph by Rick Harris, courtesy of Wikipedia

Unlike the free-for-all flexibility of the Boston Common's layout and development over three centuries, its 1837 offspring has always been very strict with its public about how it is to be used, enjoyed and traversed — in proper, prim Victorian fashion. Hence its period appearance has remained constant, save for sporadic sproutings of statues and memorials from time to time, to be examined below.

The Public Garden's "gated" entrance — and a fussy one at that — is up front about the behavioral limits set upon us the moment we enter. The garden's rigidly structured system of narrowly winding paths and an axially centered footbridge favors passive promenading over the raucous running, rollerblading, skateboarding and biking that the Common's wide, irregular, straight-as-an-arrow walkways encourage. Depending on whether we're just passing through over the bridge from Common to Commonwealth or leisurely strolling through its statuary, topiary and botany, the Garden gets us in tune to the straight-and-narrow and the winding-and-narrow. This forces us to slow down, which in turn encourages us to stop and smell the flowers and see the statues and memorials. Some of these are explored here so the just-passin'-thru crowd can take note of what they've been missing.

Hail Hale!

Our Common-to-Garden transition is gauntly greeted by this 1913 statue of Edward Everett Hale by Bela Pratt, sculptor of the robed female "Art" and "Science" sculptures flanking the axial approach to the Boston Public Library. This lanky likeness of the great American author, Unitarian clergyman and anti-slavery advocate (no, not rock musician) guards the Garden gate with gentility and gravity, keeping stalwart vigil over the park and its visitors to see that everything is kept as architect George F. Meacham, city engineer James Slade and forester John Galvin had intended for this 24-acre oasis.

Moreover, Hale has some Garden-gazing counsel for us:

To look up and not down,
To look forward and not back,
To look out and not in, and
To lend a hand.

— "Ten Times One Is Ten" (1870)

We may thus be tempted to look forward toward the path across the Garden's central cynosure, the 1867 cable suspension bridge (the world's shortest at the time) crossing over the swan-boat lagoon and directing us out of the Public Garden and into the Commonwealth Avenue Mall — especially if we're in a rush, which most of us are most of the time. But in being so, we, of course, miss the details and the fullness of the Public Garden experience.

So let us instead take the advice of Robert Frost:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

— "The Road Not Taken" (1920)

With that, we'll take one of the roads less traveled.

Mallards on the march

"Make Way for Ducklings" sculpture by Nancy Schön. Photo by Gareth Owen.

Which is making a difference already. Nancy Schön's 1987 bronze castings of Mrs. Mallard and her ornithic progeny Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack, the subjects of Robert McCloskey's beloved book Make Way for Ducklings, are leading us on in a different direction, more akin to the erratic way the Mallards flew all over Boston in search of a home before settling down on the island in the Public Garden lagoon.

Of course, Mr. Hale, the Mallards had to look down to find their home, as we must do to notice their statues. Avoiding decoy artifice or duck- umbrella polish, Schön's sculpture has a rugged organicity that blends well with its natural environs and an actual-size likeness simpatico with the real ducks in the lagoon (right).

The dutiful attentiveness of the mother, the premature restlessness of the ducklings, and their basic instinct to follow Mom's guiding wing are evident in the diversity of postures from figure to figure and the sinuous but steady curve of their caravan. Which also goes with the flow of the Garden's curving paths and organically shaped lagoon. The Mallards' 35-foot Belgian-stone platform recalls the cobblestone paving of Beacon Hill's Louisburg Square, where Mrs. Mallard considered homesteading until the traffic-free Public Garden made way for her, by virtue of the tranquility its "roads less traveled by" would bring her family. At left is their final landing, a haven of dense foliage, soft earth, wild grasses, birdsongs, light and shadow — all of the nurturing nature they couldn't find anywhere else in Boston's asphalt, cobblestone or concrete jungles. But the ducks' domain is strictly for the birds, because it's surrounded by...

Water!

Yes, Mallard Manor is none other than the island in the middle of the north end of the lagoon, where no man lands (save for a skate lace-up in the winter).

Reserved for the birds and their Swan Boat compatriots, the lagoon is off limits to the rowboats, sailboats, kayaks and Harvard crews that scared the Mallards away from the Esplanade.

So let's proceed along the Public domain...

Tetsu tourou

Which means "iron lantern" in Japanese. A gift to the City of Boston from Japanese-American merchant Bunkio Matsuki in 1905, this 16th-century tetsu tourou symbolizes Boston's long-term liaison with Japan in its oriental ceremonial presence, its tip of the hat to iron manufacturer Horace Gray's benefaction of the Garden, and in the way it makes a Japanese garden out of its immediate surroundings.

Unlike the geometrical perfection and symmetrical propriety of the pedestals, platforms and plinths of its American counterparts, the lantern is situated on a rugged rock reminiscent of the organic nature revered in its homeland's rock gardens. Which jibes gingerly with the organically curvy lagoon, as well as the Garden's Japanese scholar trees and weeping willows. And yes, the Mallards' Belgian-stone walk and the George Robert White Memorial's cobblestone plaza (discussed below) are organic in their own right, which further bridges East and West in the Public Garden.

Good Will Hunting

At right, a couple of friends of mine are showing good will toward each other on the bench where Robin Williams and Matt Damon (left) sat in that 1997 movie — or so my friends thought. At least one thing is definite from this still: George Washington horsebacked here. Speaking of which...

Separated at birth?

Yes, I mixed them up myself at first — on my first walk through the Public Garden on a fifth-grade field trip. When we passed the equestrian effigy of our founding father, a classmate blurted out, "George Washington!" to which I responded, "Paul Revere!" Then my classmate drew my attention to the former's last name carved into his stone pedestal. I stood corrected but confused: a head-on glance at him still convinced me it was the coppersmith himself — after all, Revere's iconic likeness had more picture-postcard familiarity to Boston newbies like me — though why Revere's pedestal would bear Washington's name was beyond me.

They do bear a striking resemblance, not just as revolutionary contemporaries, but in their horse-stances: right arm out, left front horse-leg up, horse-head bowed, comparable cockades and boots. To boot, both have oblong granite pedestals and tree-lined pedestrian mall environs. But I eventually got the distinction between them when I observed that Washington rides toward his mall (Commonwealth Avenue Mall, across Arlington Street), while Revere rides out of his (Paul Revere Mall, a.k.a. "The Prado," in the North End), embarking on his Midnight Ride to Lexington and Concord on April 18, 1775, to warn locals of impending Redcoat robbery of ammunition caches.

Furthermore, they're 71 years apart. Thomas Ball's Washington statue was dedicated in 1869, Cyrus Dallin's Revere in 1940. And, of course, Washington the general, unlike Revere the minuteman, carries a sword and wears a fancier coat.

Command center

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

He is also strategically sited on a central axis with the bridge behind him and Commonwealth Avenue Mall ahead of him, as a logical lead-in toward the latter from the former, an initiator of the Mall's succession of statues, and a connector of the Common, the Garden and the Mall as the crown jewel and scepter in Boston's Emerald Necklace.

This symbolizes our first Commander-in-Chief as a bridge-builder between the colonies (as represented by his capital city's location at the center of the Atlantic Seaboard), a unifier of the States, and an initiator of America's westward expansion. Likewise, the Public Garden initiated Boston's westward expansion into the Back Bay, which was followed by the annexation of neighboring towns (Allston, Brighton, Dorchester, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, Roslindale, Roxbury) as "streetcar suburbs" for those too fiscally challenged for the Back Bay's nouveau riche. So Washington's central location couldn't be a better symbol for American and Bostonian heritage.

Ether ethereal

The 40-foot-tall Ether Monument, a.k.a. The Good Samaritan, is the Public Garden's oldest memorial. It was erected in 1867 in honor of America's first use of ether as an anesthetic and a sparer of the pain of the surgeon's scalpel and the dentist's drill — which the monument's crowning "Good Samaritan" statue, calm water pool base and upward thrust into the ether aptly commemorate.

Dentist Thomas G. Morton performed the inaugural demonstration of ether on October 16, 1846, in the operating theater under the "Ether Dome" of Charles Bulfinch's original Massachusetts General Hospital building (below). Its gray granite façade is fittingly tributed here with the use of the same material — albeit accented with red granite colonettes, marble bas-reliefs casting surgical procedures in a Biblical context, and lion-head fountains in the then-trendy High Victorian Gothic style, as opposed to Bulfinch's plainer and simpler, but equally monumental, Federal style.

Designed by William Robert Ware and sculpted by John Quincy Adams Ward, the Ether Monument is one of Boston's most immaculate blends of architecture and sculpture. The colonette-borne trefoil Gothic arches and the column-cluster statue pedestal give the monument's subject the religious spirit of a Gothic church, as its engraved Bible verse conveys:

"Neither shall there be any more pain."

— Revelation 21:4

"To commemorate that the inhaling of ether causes
insensibility to pain. First proved to the world at
the Mass. General Hospital in Boston,

October A.D. MDCCCXLVI"

"This also cometh forth from the Lord of Hosts
which is wonderful and excellent in working.”

— Isaiah 28:29

"In gratitude for the relief of human suffering by the
inhaling of ether a citizen of Boston has erected this
monument A.D. MDCCCLXVII."

Samaritan supreme

The monument gives no recognition to Dr. Morton, because of a then-heated debate over who really deserved credit for pioneering the use of ether.

To please all sides, the architect and sculptor designed the monument to pay homage to the unconfirmed pioneer in a universally iconic way. They cast ether's emissary in the form of a doctor dressed in a medieval Moorish-Spanish robe and turban.

In a grand yet graceful gesture of compassion he rests the body of a near-naked man on his knee and bears an ether-symbolic cloth in his left hand, ready to apply it to whatever ails the man.

In this way the good doctor projects the universal image of the biblical "Good Samaritan," familiar to all as the healer of the hurt we all hope for when we're in pain or about to undergo surgery, a root canal, a tooth extraction, or whatever calls for ether.

Light in the piazza

Yet another architecture-sculpture amalgam: the George Robert White Memorial. Defining the Garden's northwest corner, this raised plaza creates an open-space flow from garden paths to city streets as light and airy as angel wings and ether domes.

White, philanthropist and owner of Potter Drug & Chemical Corp. (makers of “Cuticura” bacterial soap), willed the city a $5 million trust to fund cultural and medical endeavors, as well as a memorial to him, upon his death in 1922. This 1924 memorial honors him as the "Angel of the Waters" casting "bread" upon the fountain-pool, according to the Book of Ecclesiastes:

George Robert White (1847-1922)
by John Singer Sargent, c.1917

This symbolizes how we can find the "bread" of the George Robert White Fund today as, to name a few, the George Robert White Memorial Building at Massachusetts General Hospital (right), the George Robert White Youth Development Center and the Blue Hill Boys and Girls Club in Dorchester, the George Robert White Schoolboy Stadium in Franklin Park, and the George Robert White Environmental Conservation Center at the Boston Nature Center and Wildlife Sanctuary in Mattapan.

Photo courtesy of English Wikipedia

Photo courtesy of the National Park Service

The bronze angel's sculptor was Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), renowned for his Abraham Lincoln sculpture (1920) in Washington's Lincoln Memorial and his Minute Man statue (1874) in Concord.

The cobblestones make the space distinctly Bostonian but could also represent crumbs from the cast bread. The bookend cornucopias symbolize the bountiful harvest of beauty and health the water-sowed bread of the George Robert White Fund has reaped.

In memoriam, in absentia

This Sept. 11, 2001 memorial reprises the plaza theme, but its special strength is the absence of sculpture, which evokes the void left by the loss of locals in those terrorist attacks. Only the names of the missing are present, and we are given space to resurrect our own memories, visions or impressions of them, backdropped by the Garden's life-reaffirming trees, grass, birds, squirrels and living pedestrians. This is how the memorial gives stage to the Garden's perpetual renewal of life and memorializes the deceased as a group rather than allowing one man to take stage as a statuary celebrity — unlike Wendell Phillips' privilege of stone-wall display showcase discussed below.

In this way Victor Walker's 2004 memorial emphasizes the ordinariness of the fallen, as citizens too common to merit the immortality of statue, bust or bas-relief. Thus we are left to weigh their importance to us, depending on how well we knew them, whether we knew them at all, and how much we reflect upon our own vulnerability and mortality through our grief for them.

By underscoring the underdog (as Phillips did in his own right as abolitionist, suffragist, labor supporter and egalitarian), the Sept. 11, 2001 memorial shatters the Brahmin erudition of the Public Garden with some of the plebeian spirit of the Boston Common — albeit benignly, as shown by Faneuil Hall Poet Laureate Lawrence Homer's selection from Boston & Sea Poems etched in the stonework, in which he makes poetic reference to the Garden's "trees and grass, and flowers," "shallow pool," "willow," "golden leaf elm" and "swanboats" visible beyond the memorial.

Remembrance row

A rare moment when a monument captivates a crowd — the dedication of the memorial to Wendell Phillips (1811-1884) on the Garden's south walk. The stone-wall backdrop makes Daniel Chester French's bronze statue stand out, forcing us to remember Phillips' legacy as advocate of the underdog.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

The backdrop frames the sculpture in a context of artistic and historical contemplation by diverting the eye from scenic background distractions. The abolitionist's erect, forward podium stance evokes his force as an orator and his firmness about the rights of blacks, Native Americans and women.

The south walk's freestanding statues, denied Phillips' stone-wall framework, blend more into their arboreal background and are more easily overlooked, especially in leaf-shadow:

Clockwise from above: Col. Thomas Cass (1821-1862), commander of the 9th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, victorious at the Battle of Mechanicsville, wounded at the Battle of Malvern Hill, died in Boston July 12, 1862. Sculptor: Richard E. Brooks. Dedicated: September 22, 1899. U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner (1811-1874), lawyer, orator, and congressman from Boston during the Civil War, leader of Massachusetts antislavery forces and congressional Radical Republicans, introduced first Civil Rights Act in 1872, died March 11, 1874. Sculptor: Thomas Ball. Dedicated: 1878. Brig. Gen. Tadeusz Kociuszko (1746-1817), Polish-Lithuanian citizen who fought in the Revolutionary War as Colonel of Engineers in the Continental Army, later became Naczelnik (commander-in-chief) of all Polish-Lithuanian forces fighting against Russian occupation of Poland, Belarus and Lithuania in the Kociuszko Uprising of 1794. Sculptor: Theo Ruggles Kitson. Dedicated: 1927.

Channing's channel

Of all the Public Garden's bronze Brahmins, William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) is the most privileged, boasting a stepped elevation like George Robert White, a stone display surround like Wendell Phillips, and a channel to the city like George Washington. This Unitarian preacher extraordinaire is given full sacrosanctity with a classical baldacchino representing his ministry at Arlington Street Church (1861, Gridley J.F. Bryant & Arthur Gilman) across the street. This was emphasized by siting his arch-niched figure on axis with the church's arched center entrance, as if he is about to proceed up the center aisle to the chancel in a formal service.

The axial arrangement also creates a direct visual link from the Garden to the Back Bay proper (which the church initiates, as the Back Bay's first public building), like the continuity Washington established from nature to neighborhood. This signifies the end of our public art and nature walk and our reentry into civilization — albeit benignly.

Off we go, into the wild blue yonder...

2010-10-10T18:39:00.000-07:00

Photos courtesy of the United States Air Force Academy

...which is just the message the United States Air Force Academy's Cadet Chapel tries to impart onto the ready-for-takeoff recruit, as the architectural definition of the U.S. Air Force's mission and the defining element of the academy's campus. Challenging our conception of "church," this 1962 modernist military meetinghouse comprises not one but 17 identical spires lined up uniformly like a regiment of recruits, a row of raised rifles, or a fleet of fighter planes "climbing high into the sun," as the official USAF song continues. This architecturally conveys the marching order, the military discipline and the all-as-one alliance the cadets need to carry out the Air Force's mission of defending "our sacred honor" in the air.

Rocky Mountain high

At 150 feet high, the Cadet Chapel articulates the USAF motto "Above All" by towering above all the other buildings — aesthetically and altitudinally — on the bland, boxy 18,000-acre campus (it does look like an airport, doesn't it?), which occupies the east side of the Rampart Range of the Rocky Mountains north of Colorado Springs, 7,258 feet above sea-level.

Architect Walter Netsch of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill thought way outside the box by designing the chapel as a tubular steel frame of 100 identical 75-foot tetrahedrons enclosed with clear triangular panels of aluminum (the stuff of planes) and infilled in-between with 1-inch-thick stained-glass ribbon mosaics. This ministerial-militaristic fusion suggests heaven-pointing steeples and heaven-soaring airplane wings simultaneously.

It could also be viewed as a geometric abstraction of the USAF insignia at left, which conveys the sacrosanctity of the Force the cadets are obliged to assume. They experience this effect most fully when they walk up the chapel's steel-railed granite exterior stairway, through its gold-anodized aluminum doors and into its main sanctuary. There, right before their eyes, a new "wild blue yonder" is created for them to contemplate as they look to Heaven for guidance in their flight.

May the Force be with you

Modeled on Sainte-Chappelle Cathedral in Paris, the Cathedral of Chartres in France and the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi in Italy, the Cadet Chapel honors its foreign tradition as well as its flying mission. The cathedral ceiling cascades in a collision of colorful jet-streams (red for flame, blue for sky) while Walter Holtkamp's 4,334-pipe, 83-rank choirloft organ resonates the airs of the Force. The American walnut and African mahogany pews, with their ends carved to recall World War I plane propellers and their backs capped by aluminum strips resembling a fighter aircraft wing's trailing edge, march reverently toward the Italian pietra santa marble chancel inlaid with semi-precious Colorado stones.

The 46-foot-high aluminum cross hanging before the airplane-hangar glass curtain wall under the roof's apex symbolizes Jesus' resurrection as an inspiration to the flight of the Force. Thus the chapel reinforces Christianity's military connotation, as extolled by Sir Arthur Sullivan:

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war

With the cross of Jesus going on before.

Christ the Royal Master leads against the foe

Forward into battle, see His banners go...

However, this interpretation of Jesus is way off the mark. He is not depicted in the Bible as a warlord, but as "The Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6), as the Sermon on the Mount clearly conveys: "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matthew 5:39) and "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you..." (Matthew 5:44) A far cry from the Air Force's "At 'em, boys, give 'er the gun"!

Protestant prominence, Catholic charity, Hebrew hanaah

The Cadet Chapel also misses the mark in the area of religious equality, reserving its main sanctuary for Protestant worship and relegating its Catholic and Jewish chapels to down under, with no Muslim mosque to speak of. Yet these spaces have their places in the sun.

The Catholic Chapel's reredos, a glass mosaic mural by Luman Martin Winter, intermingles turquoise, blue, rose and gray tessera to depict the Firmament of Heaven, as a backdrop to the Annunciation scene set by marble carvings of the Virgin Mary, Archangel Gabriel and a dove.

But these are the wings of peace, not warplanes, in another theological incongruity. The softness of the marble and its curves bring further peace to the atmosphere, giving the cadets one final taste of tranquility before the sharp, pointed wings of war transport them to the heavens.

The Italian white marble altar was given by Cardinal Francis Spellman when he dedicated the Catholic Chapel on September 22, 1963 (precisely two months before a Catholic President's assassination). Along the stained-glass window-walls are the 14 Stations of the Cross, also by Winter, carved from the Carrara marble of the quarries that supplied Michelangelo's stone. The chapel also boasts its own Holtkamp organ.

The in-the-round Jewish Chapel reprises the main attraction's glass/solid alternation, this time as a translucent glass-interspersed vertical grill of Israeli cypress stanchions. These are complemented true to heritage with a Jerusalem brownstone floor donated by the Israeli Defense Forces.

The stanchions ebb in color-filtered light from the foyer's purple, green and blue stained-glass window-wall with the verticality and candle-softness of a menorah. The Aron Kodesh shelters the Scrolls of the Torah. The foyer exhibits a Torah Scroll rescued from the Nazis during World War II, discovered in an abandoned Polish warehouse in 1989, and now dedicated to the memory of the academy alumni who fought the Nazis.

The mid-1980s paintings by Shlomo Katz tell a Torah tale along the Air Force-friendly themes of brotherhood, flight and justice, putting the Flight from Egypt in concert with the flight of the Force. But in so doing, like its Protestant patriarch and its Catholic comrade, the Jewish Chapel deviates from the peaceful slant of the old Hebrew proverb "מיהו הגיבור האמיץ ביותר? זה שהופך את אוייבו לידידו" (“Who is the bravest hero? He who turns his enemy into a friend.”)

Yet the Jewish and Catholic chapels are truly more peaceful parishes than the Protestant powerhouse above them — an agreeable tradeoff for their lower rank in the hierarchitecture of the building. The Jewish chapel's circularity, wood-grain warmth and stained-glass serenity, and the soft curves of the Catholic chapel's marble and mosaic masterworks, contrast sharply with the Protestant chapel's winglike knife-edge aluminum diagonals, which hover over the worshipers as an eagle-eye reminder that they're always under the wing of the Air Force. Conversely, the lower chapels provide parishioners with peaceful sanctuaries for personal prayer before the planes beckon them hither and yon.

Air Gardens

Overall, the spear-like spires of the Cadet Chapel do make peace with their surroundings when the Air Gardens give them the sculptural presence of public art in a park. Designed by landscape architect Dan Kiley, the Air Gardens comprises 700 feet of ornamental trees, grassy greens, lighted pools, spouting fountains and labyrinthine lanes. At the south end of the Air Gardens is a piece of real public art, the Eagle and Fledglings Statue, inscribed on its granite base with a quotation by Austin Dusty Miller, "Man's flight through life is sustained by the power of his knowledge."

The Air Gardens are the east quarter of the Terrazzo, the Cadet Area's Italian-inspired piazza of terrazzo-tiled walkways set in a rectangular grid of marble strips. This level, orderly, regimented landscape contrasts the rugged randomness of the Rockies with the geometric precision of airport runways and Air Force drill formations.

No cheating

The U.S. Air Force Academy's Cadet Honor Code, "We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does" (taken here as an oath before the Cadet Chapel's Class Wall bearing the crests of the graduating classes), certainly comes out in full force in the architecture of the Cadet Chapel.

It does not lie about its function — its multiple spires make that crystal-clear multiple times — or its structure — its exterior articulates its interior and vice versa, through the transcendent use of clear aluminum triangular paneling inward and outward. It does steal the spotlight on the campus, but, like the steepled church of the colonial village, is privileged to stand out (and up) as its spiritual center without robbing the surrounding structures of their significance to the community. It does not cheat in its ecclesiastical duty, eschewing a typical church's visual distractions of ornamentation and decoration in favor of a bare-bones, plain-skinned directness in a Cadet's communion with God.

Above All

Above all, the Cadet Chapel stands its ground in a bold expression of the terra firma of its stature and the fortitude of the fleet it symbolizes, as the official USAF song expresses at the end: "Nothing'll stop the U.S. Air Force!"

Hancock on the block...and off again

2010-09-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

Photo by wallyg of Flickr

But far from a chip off the old block, being one of the few glass skyscrapers to defy the norm of its contemporary peers as well as its historical forefathers, both financially and architecturally.

Yes, Boston's beloved (at first bedeviled) John Hancock Tower has transferred hands once again. Following a 2009 foreclosure that forced Broadway Partners to auction it off for $660 million ($640 million going to their defaulted loan) to Normandy Real Estate Partners and Five Mile Capital Partners, these guys put the Back Bay behemoth back on the market and got bids from Boston Properties, owners of the Hancock's architectural/actuarial rival, the Prudential Tower (below, left) down the block; Beacon Capital Partners, who had unloaded the Hancock in Broadway's lap in late '06 for a whopping $1.3 billion; and Vornado Realty Trust, owner-uppers to the $700 million Filene’s rehab debacle (below, right), Casey Ross of The Boston Globe reported on August 26, 2009.

Guess who won out? None other than the Pru's owners, for a record-breaking $930 million, which includes $289.5 million in cash, $640.5 million in assumed debt, and about $2 million in acquisition costs, Craig M. Douglas of the Boston Business Journal reported on October 4, 2010.

Hard to believe those rivals are now siblings!

Photo by jonmike12 of Photobucket

But, as the Filene's fiasco goes to show, the recession has cooled new construction in Boston, so its existing buildings from recessions and recoveries past are the hot property now. The cool blue glass giant's front-and-centeredness in this market isn't surprising, given its Miesian masterwork, its photogenic familiarity, and its stalwart status as New England's tallest building (thanks to the recession), yet is, given its shaky foundations.

Hancock's harrowing history

The 1968-1972 excavation of 500 million pounds of earth for the building's steel-pile down-to-bedrock foundations certainly shook those of its Copley Square neighborhood. The foundation dig's temporary steel retaining walls warped, the Back Bay's soft mud and blue clay landfill gushed in, streets and sidewalks cracked, utility lines ruptured, and the wood-and-granite transept foundations of next-door neighbor Trinity Church nearly collapsed, resulting in Trinity's victorious multi-million-dollar lawsuit of John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company.

Photo by Ernst Halberstadt, courtesy of US National Archive

An eye-popping sight the tower hardly was at first. Upon its topping off in August 1972 (beating its rival Pru — then Boston's biggest, boxiest and boringest — by 41 feet and 8 stories), its 500-pound, 4-by-11-foot glass panes began popping out, causing a maelstrom of glass showers and Boston Police street closures (but, deo gratias, no injuries). The plywood infill of the window voids earned the building the sobriquets "Plywood Palace" and "Plywood Ranch" (the moniker of a suburban lumber-yard chain at the time) and the visual distinction of a grain elevator. Lab research concluded that oscillating expansions and contractions of the air between each window's inner and outer panels caused the pop-outs of the windows, hence their total replacement with half-inch-thick heat-treated single panes by manufacturer Libbey-Owens-Ford, who bore the redo's entire $7 million price tag.

Photo by Jovianeye

Photo by Trxr4kds

To top it all off, the tower began to sway in the high winds it caused, and Swiss Engineer Bruno Thurlimann determined these winds could topple it eventually. Thus it was reinformed with 1,500 tons of diagonal steel bracing like that of its 1970 predecessor, Chicago's John Hancock Center (left), and Le Messurier Consultants retrofit its 58th floor with a $3 million "tuned mass damper" like the one they installed in New York's 1978 Citicorp (now Citigroup) Tower (right). The tuned mass damper was best described by architecture critic Robert Campbell in The Boston Globe ("Builders faced bigger crisis than falling windows," March 3, 1995):

Two 300-ton weights sit at opposite ends of the 58th floor of the Hancock. Each weight is a box of steel, filled with lead, 17 feet (5.2 m) square by 3 feet (0.9 m) high. Each weight rests on a steel plate. The plate is covered with lubricant so the weight is free to slide. But the weight is attached to the steel frame of the building by means of springs and shock absorbers. When the Hancock sways, the weight tends to remain still... allowing the floor to slide underneath it. Then, as the springs and shocks take hold, they begin to tug the building back. The effect is like that of a gyroscope, stabilizing the tower. The reason there are two weights, instead of one, is so they can tug in opposite directions when the building twists. The cost of the damper was $3 million. The dampers are free to move a few feet relative to the floor.

Naturally, all those repairs, reparations, replacements and retrofits soared the Hancock's construction costs from $75 million to $175 million.

But by the time the dust, glass and oil had settled upon its five-years-in-arrears dedication on September 29, 1976, its liquid-blue glass facade, its geometric angularity, and its sheer skyscraper stature over a historically low-scale, tradition-bound city was already attracting the iconic awe it continues to capture today. The following year, the American Institute of Architects gave it a National Honor Award.

In 1983, it received the Boston Society of Architects' annual Harleston Parker Medal (the third Hancock building to do so) — a far cry from the BSA crying foul in 1967 over its alleged "relationship, or lack of it, to Trinity Church and Copley Square, [so] one has to assume that it will be the bellwether of all contemporary urban design problems" (which it was, for a few years and many million$). A mid-1990s Boston Globe poll of architects rated it Boston's third best work of architecture. Even New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, according to a Sept. 23, 2010 Globe editorial, called the Hancock Tower "one of the most beautiful skyscrapers ever built."

Here's why.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

The fairest weather of all is magically mirrored on the Hancock's 10,344-pane glass curtain wall by a pure-blue hue. When the clouds roll by, their reflection rolls with them. When skies are gray, so is the Hancock. At night, its interior light pierces through its panes in a majestic moonlighting of midnight oil.

But most of all, architect Henry Cobb of I.M. Pei & Partners (now Pei Cobb Fried & Partners) designed the tower to reflect its neighbors as opposed to crowding or overbearing them — that is, to defer to Copley Square history as well as to make it.

And here's where "complexity and contradiction in architecture," in Robert Venturi's phraseology, comes into play in the Hancock. Its glass skin, its 60-story height and its amalgam of trapezoidal, parallelogram and triangular shapes are decidedly a radical departure from Boston's boxy, low-scale, historically derivative masonry building tradition. But at the same time it appears to "disappear" from our consciousness as its one-way mirror-glass walls mirror-image their historical environs, depending on where we're standing or walking or which way the sun is shining. In this way it showcases a panoply of architectural styles while being ever-so-humble about its own.

In the crystal we see...

...H.H. Richardson's Richardsonian Romanesque Trinity Church (1877)...

...Cummings & Sears' Northern Italian Gothic New Old South
Church (1874), McKim, Mead & White's Renaissance Revival
Boston Public Library (1895)...

...Hardenbergh & Blackall's Italian Renaissance Fairmont Copley Plaza
Hotel (1912) (note how the glass refracts sunlight onto the old facade,
bringing it to our attention even more)...

...the 1920s Georgian Revival YWCA...

...and the John Hancock Family Portrait: Parker, Thomas & Rice's original 1922 Neoclassical
John Hancock Building, backed up by Cram & Ferguson's Art Deco 1947 expansion (themselves
Harleston Parker laureates: the former in 1924, the latter in 1950), visually charting the course
of the insurer's growth from tiny acorn to tall oak to towering redwood, but lately overgrown by a
competitor, New England Life's Anglo-Italianate Postmodern 500 Boylston Street (1988, Johnson
& Burgee).

Just like a good neighbor

In further observation of John Hancock Life's "good neighbor" policy, the tower also defers to its surroundings by setting itself back enough from them on all sides to bring them into clear view as we round the corners of the tower. In this way the tower serves as a visual orientation point for tourists and sightseers by directing their attention toward landmarks that signify where they are in the city: Copley Square.

Around the corner we see...

...Trinity (and Old South, reflected in the glass as we pass)...

...the Boston Public Library (and, again, Old South)...

...the 1930s Art Deco New England Power Building, where a
trompe-l'oeil is created with its reflection, giving the illusion
of a full building extending beyond the Hancock's wall...

...and likewise with The Clarendon, Robert A.M. Stern's new high-rise
hulk, liberating it from its boxy boredom with a whimsical wingspread
like that of the Hancock itself.

The Sleight-of-Hancock also plays tricks with Trinity, doubling
it up to give it more of the preacherly preeminence Richardson
intended it to have in Copley Square, as a gracious way to
preserve Richardson's favorite view of the church.

The Hancock is just as simpatico with the Fairmont, condescending
to match the height of the older building's roofline with a lower-level
Trinity Place face. This reinforces the horizontality of its neighbor's
stringcourse rustication as a lowly counterpoint to the tower's
predominant verticality, which itself accentuates the upwardness
of the church spires and high-rises it reflects.

To accomplish both of these accommodations to its elders, the tower's main frame had to be skewed into a parallelogram, which put it perpendicular with Copley's original bisecting vector, Huntington Avenue:

Photo by Bobak Ha'eri

And this twist of fate does the Hancock's occupants a neighborly favor: it yields a spacious entrance plaza with a protective canopy and a prominent view of the tower's ancestors. However, wind tunnels come with the territory, but picturesque plantings mitigate this misstep.

In all of these ways, the John Hancock Tower confirms an architect's observation of it from 1975: "It really is an excellent [neighbor], because it looks like it isn't there" — at least, from this angle:

Where's Johnny?

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

For a clue, observe the shadow slashing diagonally across the Back Bay landscape, meeting head-on with the Massachusetts Avenue bridge to MIT so as to form a near-right angle with the bridge (all 364.4 Smoots + 1 Ear of it) from this perspective. Then take a ruler and connect the bridge's MIT end with the shadow's foot, and the ruler's edge will scribe Johnny's vertical notch, yielding a near-right triangle. Another mathemagical marvel from Mr. Hancock!

In reality, virtual or otherwise, Johnny's not going anywhere. Worth almost $1 billion to his buyers, he's still Johnny-on-the-spot, whether he's in the spotlight or not. And that's something to get Hancocky about.

My kind of place

2010-09-14T15:44:00.000-07:00

Believe me, this is my favorite apartment building in Boston. Its design, composition, balance, proportions, scale, symmetry, and mélange of materials are all so perfect that, if I had my druthers, I'd live here.

This is none other than The Peabody in Peabody Square in Dorchester's up-and-coming Ashmont neighborhood. Built in 1896-97 from a design by Ashmont architect Edwin J. Lewis, this 3.5-story U-shaped grouping of apartments exemplifies the English Tudor style at its most intimate and least fussy. The uniform solidity of its brick walls, the modest scale of its fenestration, the geometric precision of its high-hipped slate roofs and dormer gables (owing, no doubt, to Lewis's MIT education), and the cocoony feel of its forecourt entrance all convey comfort, coziness and congeniality inside.

Photo by James L. Woodward

In his book Ashmont: An Historical Guide to Peabody Square, Carruth's Hill, and Ashmont Hill and the Architecture of Edwin J. Lewis, Jr. and John A. Fox, architectural historian Douglass Shand-Tucci describes The Peabody as comprising "four connected brick three-deckers with servants' quarters under the roof. Two of the four entrance porches to each three-decker are visible in the courtyard." The three-decker, Dorchester's perennial staple of affordable, home-as-investment housing made to order for the influx of immigrants that spawned the annexation and expansion of Boston's "streetcar suburbs," is given a treatment of castle-like comfort, fireproof fortitude and homey homogeneity at The Peabody. (A three-and-a-half-decker, even a double-decker, no less.)

"The ground-story apartments of the two three-deckers whose narrow ends face Ashmont Street," Shand-Tucci continues, "were designed for doctors and incorporate waiting rooms and offices, features common to both in-town and streetcar-suburb apartment houses." Doctors were what immediately came to mind when I first set eyes on The Peabody. Its solid, sheltering sensibility would ease my anxiety about going to the doctor, and its homelike humility would truly make me feel at home in a doctor's office.

The Peabody is neighborly in other ways, too — and its namesake, Col. Oliver Peabody (1834-1896), a founder of the Kidder, Peabody & Co. securities firm, set out to make it so. As benefactors of next-door neighbor All Saints' Episcopal Church (1892-94), the chef d'oeuvre of English Gothic master architect Ralph Adams Cram, the Colonel and his wife, Mary Lothrop Peabody, constructed the apartment building to shelter the church from clamorous Dorchester Avenue in a way that complemented the church architecturally. The Peabodys also donated the square's central plot for park use (originally a circle, it became a triangle when the streetcars rattled in). To honor his shaping of the neighborhood, the Boston City Council named it Peabody Square in 1893. In memory of his brother, Francis H. Peabody erected the park's granite oval drinking trough (for horses and people) in 1899.

The Peabody is simultaneously jolly good fellows and amiable archrivals with its English medieval revival contemporary. The edifices play off one another as a classic cluster of contrasts cut from the same cloth: Gothic vs. Tudor, stone vs. brick, random ashlar vs. regular rows, battlements vs. gables, bell tower vs. chimneys, front tower entry vs. setback court entry, erect vs. squat, longitudinal vs. latitudinal, L-shaped vs. U-shaped, picturesque vs. symmetrical... yet sharing a common English bond.

Yes, the clock in the old pic still ticks, having done so for the most part with clockwork regularity since its erection there in 1910 by the E. Howard Clock Company of Roxbury. “Acting on instructions of His Honor Mayor Hibbard, I am contemplating installing a twelve foot, four dial, post clock in the public square, known as Peabody Square, junction of Dorchester and Talbot Avenues, Ashmont," wrote G.W. Morrison, Superintendent of Public Buildings, to the Boston Art Commission dated May 14, 1909. "Each dial is to be thirty inches in diameter… The enclosed blueprint shows the design of clock to be used and I respectfully request the approval of the Art Commission," who unanimously approved the classically columned clock.

Boston's only architect-designed clock (until Northeastern University came up with its tubular timekeeper tower in the 1980s), the Peabody Square Clock came from the drafting table of William Downer Austin, a Boston Society of Architects member. The E. Howard Clock Company considered adapting Austin's design as a prototype for citywide clocks, but this never came to pass until pseudo-Victorian variations sprang up in Cleveland Circle, Washington Square and other crossroads a century later.

Yes, time has proven that classic clocks perform a better civic duty to crossroads commuters than contemporary contraptions (though, admittedly, an E. Howard antiquity would stick out like a square at a hippie gathering on Northeastern's ultramodern campus). And this timekeeper would certainly be a graceful greeting for me each morning were The Peabody my pad.

And so would The Peabody's other historic neighbors, clockwise from its left:

O’Brien’s Market (1884), a mixed-use building designed by W. Whitney Lewis in the quintessence of the Queen Anne style: a brick first floor of arched openings, wood-shingled upper floors, an off-center oriel window, an octagonal main wall culminating in a pyramid-topped tureet, an off-center gable with a trio of lookout windows, terra cotta carvings in the ridges of the intersecting gables, and a sand-and-pebble mosaic of sinuous decorations and the building's year of construction spelled out in small blackened stones.

Hotel Argyle (1888-92), constructed as a chic residential hotel with ground-floor storefronts.

Ashmont Fire House (1895), designed by city architect Edmund March Wheelwright, who concurrently did the Park Street and Boylston T stations. He's also infamous for the Harvard Lampoon building, a neo-Jacobean-Medieval-Tudor-Anglo-Saxon-whatevayawannacallit which gags forth Hahvahd's hahas, heehees and hohos, and where Conan O'Brien got his early cracks at comedy before his big boob-tube breakthrough. But I digress (couldn't help it — I was a class ahead of Conan at Brookline High). Wheelwright curbs his sense of humor here at the station, infusing his Italian Renaissance Revival firehouse with the serious, straightforward intent of the dedicated firefighter: an austere, restrained symmetrical composition of burnt Sienna brick, an Italian lookout loggia of Corinthian columns denoting the firefighters' vigilant eyes on the neighborhood, and a slate hipped roof overhanging like a fire helmet's brim.

Make room for modern, Mr. Peabody — the new Ashmont MBTA station, when completed, will soar like a seagull with its single-slope shelter of steel trusses. One of three new Dorchester Red Line stations designed or redesigned by Cambridge Seven Associates (Fields Corner and Shawmut are the others), this one replaces a bunker-box of cavernous concrete and integrates Ashmont's pedestrian, bus and subway transit modes with a gesture of geometric gentility. So as not to disrupt the square's Victorian vehemence, the station is set back behind a sweeping plaza right by The Peabody.

The plaza already expands Peabody Square's civic contribution to the neighborhood by hosting one of several farmer's markets dotted throughout Dot (Dorchester's nickname). Every Friday from 3-7 p.m., fresh vegetables and fruits flourish here in the convenience of next-door one-stop shopping on a budget for Peabody dwellers already paying through the nose to live at their luxurious location.

The Peabody's sense of time and place makes it my kind of place!

Anniversaarinen!

2010-08-20T20:57:00.001-07:00

Can you believe the great Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen was born 100 years ago today? The timeless tenacity of his concrete curves, stainless steel, swinging swoops, window walls, curvy chairs and toadstool tables do not look like the legacy of a centenarian. But they're always worth a second look, which I will do below.

CBS Building

This is always worth a second look, especially in light of the dim view of it New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger took in 1979:

CBS is decent architecture and terrible urbanism... Saarinen's only skyscraper has been overly praised, which, given the mediocrity of its neighbors on Sixth Avenue, may be understandable. But when viewed in absolute terms, this is a rather flawed building. The granite-clad tower stands absolutely aloof, in a depressed "plaza" of its own making. The lack of an entrance from Sixth Avenue, where there are stairs down from the sidewalk placed as if only to tease, is especially galling. This is the building as pure object, not the building as a part of a complex, functioning city. (Paul Goldberger, The City Observed: New York: A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan, New York, Vintage Books, 1979, pp. 174-175)

One could say just that about the building's 1965 contemporary, the Prudential Tower, Boston's most "aloof" building in architectural style (anti-Victorian "freshness," to be sure), contextual placement (a standalone monolith, America's tallest building outside of New York at its dedication), mediocrity of surroundings (its forecourt plaza will never be Rockefeller Center, and its contemporary hotel/apartment blocks are just that — blocks), confusion about where its entrance lies (more recently clarified and dignified by its Shops at the Prudential Center extension), and stalwart refusal to communicate compatibly with a historic neighborhood. Turning a cold, nondescript face toward its neighbors on each side, it always appears to have its back toward us, save for the skywalk-level signage that meets its minimum frontage requirements and, at least, makes it clear whose hat it wears.

Not only does the CBS building possess everything the Pru lacks — Class, Beauty, Style — but the Pru's liabilities are CBS's assets. Saarinen himself tells us how:

We tried to place the building on the site so that we could have a plaza and still not destroy the street line. A tower should not be tied in with lower street buildings. It should stand alone with air and light around it. A plaza is a very necessary thing in a city. It lets people sit in the sun and look at the sky. A plaza allows a building to be seen. Our buildings should be seen, because they are monuments of our time. (Aline B. Saarinen, ed., Eero Saarinen on his Work, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1962, pp. 16-17)

Its solitary plaza siting gives it an all-around setback that allows all of its offices light and air, not just those privileged to be above the abutments, on the street or over the courtyard in a typical block-locked building.

However, as you may gather from the above photo, the light and air of the office ambiance is counterbalanced by the darkness and heft of the facade itself, another conscious intention of Saarinen:

From the beginning, I imagined CBS as a dark building. A dark building seemed more quiet and dignified and appropriate to this site. We learned from our Oslo embassy that a dark building looks well in a city. It should also look permanent. I think too much modern architecture is flimsy-looking. One of the things I learned from my father is that a building should weather well. The CBS building should be a masonry building: concrete, clad in granite. (Ibid.)

Which leads me to the Nordic facet of CBS: how it expresses the spirit of Saarinen's Scandinavian origins.

River deep, mountain high

The facade intersperses triangular black granite piers — hence its sobriquet, Black Rock — with vertical window strips. The former geometrically abstract Finland's mountains, the latter allude to its fjords, referencing its characteristic land-and-sea dichotomy. When viewed from an acute angle, each face appears to be a solid masonry wall — a visual trick the Pru's immutable boxiness can't dream of playing.

The sunken plaza reinforces the fjord/mountain contrast with a depth like a moat surrounding a mountainous castle and a perimeter like a lake encompassing an island, e.g., Crater Lake's envelopment of the extinct volcano Wizard Island, or the real moat encircling Saarinen's 1955 Kresge Chapel at MIT (right). This could indeed lay a foundation for Goldberger's isolationist stance on the CBS building, but it also creates the much-needed multicultural diversity Sixth Avenue was sobbing for.

Also unlike the Pru, slender steel mullions are gone in favor of a more naturalistic, less mechanized appearance. This emphasis on granite posts could have ushered in the postmodern era, the historically referential negation of the International Style's modernist monotony. CBS's chief rebuttal to the International Style's glass-and-steel uniformity is its contrast of solid and void: solid granite, transparent windows, like the Finnish landscape's contrasts of rock-solid mountains with fluid, open fjords.

Black forest

Dark as bark, the granite posts recall the Finnish forests in terms of somberness and straight-up growth — another of Saarinen's intents for CBS:

Now, as to the nature of the design. I wanted a building that would be a soaring thing... I wanted a building that would stand firmly on the ground and would grow straight up. Your eyes should be led up to comprehend a building as a whole thing. (Ibid.)

The continuity of the posts and their sharp edges certainly do lead the eye upward, accomplishing Saarinen's ultimate goal for the building:

The verticality of the tower is emphasized by the relief made by the triangular piers between the windows. These start at the pavement and soar up 491 feet. Its beauty will be, I believe, that it will be the simplest skyscraper statement in New York. (Ibid.)

Impudent imitators

Goldberger called Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's 1950 Manhattan House "a very fine building but a very bad model" (Ibid., p. 264). He could justifiably say the same for CBS, in light of the "terrible urbanism" its emulators wrought in their neighborhoods.

A case in point is SOM's 60 State Street in Boston. Built in 1977, this 509-foot, 38-floor office building is a rather nondescript attempt to "Bostonize" Saarinen's fjord-and-forest Finn-esse. His alternation of triangular granite piers with floor-to-ceiling window banks is reprised here, as is the entry plaza, all with regional modifications.

The use of pink granite jibes agreeably with the colonial city's red-brick vernacular prominent in neighboring Faneuil Hall and City Hall Plaza, but the apex slots of the piers — apparently window-washing equipment tracks — weaken the rock-solid mountain effect Saarinen intended for CBS, thereby exposing the granite as a tacked-on facade and destroying the illusion of structural fortitude that works so well at CBS. Wider and shallower windows yield a brighter and a tad broader office interior.

The plaza is raised rather than sunken, to make it level with State Street for clock-wise CEOs who don't have time to go up and down steps, and to allow for ground-level restaurant/bar commerce for Freedom Trail tourists and others. Of course, the Hillstone restaurant required a ventilation duct, which compromises its blockage of the plaza flow with a granite effacement to hide its bones.

In fact, 60 State Street's dual octagonal form, a deviation from CBS's rectangular block, does make it look like a pair of ventilation ducts from a distance — with none of the sculptural distinction of the Central Artery's real vents, such as the Haymarket Parking Garage and Vent Building at right. Both buildings belie their functions. The Vent Building masks its grimy utility as twin towers with the monumental soar of eagle wingspreads and the brick town house/town hall vernacular of colonial Boston. However, 60 State Street ends up looking less monumental, more dully utilitarian than Saarinen's goals for the CBS Building, owing to the former's confused mumbo-jumbo of disparate influences and site-mandated compromises, not to mention the inimitability of its innovative precursor.

ICA = Internal Confusion Articulated

2010-02-21T18:10:00.000-08:00

When Boston's "new and improved" Institute of Contemporary Art finally opened its doors (if you could find them) on December 10, 2006, $51 million in the making and three months behind schedule, this architecture-as-sculpture glass-and-steel gimmick was much ballyhooed as not only the signature building, declarative statement and defining landmark of Boston's New Frontier (the as-yet barely-built Seaport District), but also the daring, bold, radical new architecture for which Boston had been pining through Postmodernism since the completion of City Hall in 1969 and the John Hancock Tower in 1976. In other words (that is, mine),

Boston's first new museum since 1909,

The wave of the future in modern design.

Rave reviews

"So let's applaud the ICA and, of course, its nervy and creative architects, Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro of New York," commented Robert Campbell in The Boston Globe. "Let's hope they've broken through to an era of Boston architecture that will be just as exciting as it is thoughtful, responsible, and courteous to its surroundings."

"That entrancing image sums up the museum’s goal of resensitizing its audience to the world’s tactile surfaces, its patterns, its range of scales — whether the subject before us is the city or a solitary work of art," wrote Nicolai Ouroussoff in The New York Times. "It is the architecture of empathy, welcome therapy for a self-involved age."

"The Institute of Contemporary Art is the new crown jewel of Boston’s waterfront, featuring innovative design that effortlessly weaves together interior and exterior, producing shifting perspectives of the waterfront throughout upper-level galleries and various public spaces," says Wolfgang Puck, who caters for the ICA's Water Café, where patrons and passers-by can indulge in gourmet breads, pastries, Peet's Coffee, signature sandwiches and salads, homemade soups, grilled panini, or Sherry Yard desserts on a breezy harborview deck in warmer months or an airy café when it's colder.

Even I couldn't help getting caught up in the hoo-ha over that harborside spectacle. For no waterfront wonder had so captivated my gaze since Fort Independence on Castle Island, which shares the characteristic of a functional yet monumental geometric form of clean lines and planes with its new fellow South Bostonian, despite being 160-something years its senior.

And, of course, the razzle- dazzle of light that pops, pours and permeates through the ICA's translucent glass skin at night certainly makes fireworks on the waterfront — though it will never be to Boston what The Pier is to St. Petersburg, Florida (right). For in that Tampa Bay tourist tank, nightlighting and nightlife are one.

Art critic

Yes, a recent visit to the ICA with some friends left me with the feeling that it's not all it's cracked up to be. For one, it clearly violates the architectural principle coined by Louis Sullivan and practiced by his Modernist successors, "Form follows function." Here, function follows form, in that its oddball (make that oddsquare) configuration forces its interior spaces to conform to its exterior structure in a way that makes the floor plan devoid of the logically coherent flow from artwork to artwork, from gallery space to gallery space, that an art museum of any size, shape or style has always entailed for artistic continuity's sake.

For starters, the entrance isn't exactly "entrancing" in comparison to those of its forbears, both classical and contemporary. Take Guy Lowell's Museum of Fine Arts: its front-and-center entrance with symmetrically projecting wings welcomes us right in from Huntington Avenue with open arms, aided spatially by an airy plaza and symbolically by the arms-to-the-sky gesture of the equestrian Native American statue out front. The Gardner Museum's houselike frontage and sidewalk abutment seem to say, "Welcome home." Clarity of entry is also obvious in all three of Harvard's art museums: the axial centeredness of the Fogg, the pylon-flanked glass gateway of James Stirling's Sackler Museum, and the prominent on-ramp orientations to the entry points of Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

But what kind of an entrance is this? It doesn't exactly say, "Come on in, the door's open." Not only is the door not clear right away, but this facade lacks what Robert Campbell calls "face." For its main face is its harborside end. As we approach its entrance, we are greeted with the facelessness of a husband who can't look up from his desk, computer or drafting table when his wife walks in. Nor is the randomized mishmash of opaque glass panels particularly empathetic. Furthermore — and Ouroussoff and I are one on this one — "the main entrance is set at the corner and cuts diagonally into the lobby, creating an awkward leftover space just inside the street facade. The space functions neither as a lobby nor a contemplative corner." Self-involved, indeed!

Lofty lobby

Yet the picture does change when we enter the lobby, which is therapeutic in its comfort, convenience and clarity. The cathedral ceiling creates an airy ambiance that internalizes the district's open-air seaport scene. The glass curtain wall lets in generous light for the current introductory exhibit along the long wall. Benches are handy. The gift shop, coatcheck and admissions desk are in plain sight. But, as you'll see, it ain't so for the show of shifty, rather than shifting, perspectives that's to follow.

Flight of fancy, flight of flatness

As I mentioned, the continuity of artistic circulation is missing, and to continue the visual voyage one must climb or liftoff three flights. Fortunately the latter can be done by a lofty, elbow-roomy great glass elevator. But Willy Wonka's factory this isn't, for two flights of faceless white walls and doors, floor-slab structures and factory-fab elevator parts pass us en route to the eye candy. As an alternative for the physically up-to-it, the stair has enough metallic, angular quirk to dazzle the design-sensed.

Fourth-floor flow

Alight at floor four, and the fun restarts. The top floor's cantilevered projection out over the building's seafront expresses the very expanse of its exhibit space, which pops out poignantly upon walking in, finally yielding the roominess artworks need to display themselves most distinctly and we need to contemplate them most completely. And just like a museum ought to do, spaces lead into spaces of a wide variety — large and small, light and dark.

The dark side

On the dark side of my museum visit was a room within a room: Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczdo's ...OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project, a projection of the image of the grimy industrial windows of an abandoned factory warehouse onto the unlit walls of a windowless room. On exhibit from Veterans' Day 2009 through March 28, 2010, this audiovisual meditation on the ambiguity, uncertainty and trauma of firsthand experience of war combined unanticipated sound effects with ever-changing visual images of a war in a third-world country. Serene scenes of skies outside the 13-foot-high windows were disrupted with nerving noises of "outside" Arabic chatter, choppers, carbombs, and gunfire, some smashing right through the windowpanes and walls of our warehouse hideaway, shattering our illusion of safety from the killing fields. Under cover, or under fire? Safe, or suspect? Should I stay, or should I go, risking casualty either way? These and other jarring conundra — war vs. peace, life vs. death, safety vs. vulnerability, innocence vs. experience, survival vs. surge — were all explored in this point-blank presentation of the devastation, unpredictability and irresoluteness of war, especially the imbroglios we're in now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Go inside (if you dare)...

Blue skies. Fluffy clouds. Children's laughter. Arabic chatter. Radio crackle. Obama: "We need to use diplomacy to resolve our problems wherever possible." Reporter: "A senior Hamas official has told Al Jazeera that this is a Martin Luther King moment.” Peace. Peace be within thy walls...

Uh oh — helicopter shadow... chopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchopchop...

Kidlaughter. Thump. Ball bounds up. Thump. Crack! Hit window. Yikes. What now...

Cutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcut... copter gone... vehicles rumble down... whew.

“We were here before. Remember that?” Keep down. Keep quiet.

“What’s going on?”

“Get the kids out of here!"

“Look at that pile of trash.”

Thump. Kid screams. Bang.

“What’s going on up there?”

Bang. Blam. Pow. Pop.

“On the balcony!”

BOOM! Smoke outside. Pow. Blam. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Ak-ak. Boom-boom. K'tuk-k'tuk. Cries of pain, shouts of terror. Bang bang bang bang.

“Second window on the left.”

BANG-CRACK! Pane broken. Oh no. Can they see me... are they in here... do they know who...

“Miller’s down.”

“Shut that dog up!” Bang bang. Yelp yelp. Dog gone.

“Taking fire.” CRASHBANG! Pane shattered. Cut and run? Duck and cover? Run for cover?

BLAPP! Panes out. Frames bent. They're coming. They're here. Covered? Cornered? Help...

PYONGGG! Hole in wall. Missed me. Ugh. Me next? Heartpoundpoundpoundpoundpound...

Skies clearing. Storm over. All quiet on the...

BLAM! "AAAAHHHH!"

“The kid’s been hit.”

Take him or leave him? Me or him?

“Let’s get out of here.” Rummmmble-roarrrrrrr...

Arabic cries. “Yasmin!” Wail. Silence.

The shot walls and windows dissolve into their prewar state. Safe... only a movie... only a memory... exit laughing... or leaden... but...OUT OF HERE!

The bright side...but not the right side

Photograph by Christopher Peterson — www.christopherpeterson.com

Lightening us up from that dark danger-zone are the real windowpanes of the Menino Room (named for Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino), a long, tall hall with an all-glass wall boasting the most sky-high, sea-wide, free-as-a-seagull panorama of Boston Harbor you'll ever see, next to being on the Water Café. Spanning the fourth floor's frontage, this outside-in bedazzlement serves no purpose other than as a function/reception room where champagne, Chauvignon, cheddar and chit-chat can be indulged in amid the oohs and ahhs of harbor heaven.

Photograph by Christopher Peterson
www.christopherpeterson.com

Poor judgment, in my view — a lost opportunity for another great gallery space. Of course, the sun from the window-wall would fade artwork hanging on the facing wall, which renders that wall useless, wasted space (except for refracting the window-wall light to make the room brighter). Thus the solid wall cries out for some kind of artistic identity, especially when it exhibits its blankness through the glass from an across-the-harbor point of view: So this is the Institute of Contemporary Art — so where's the art? No clear expression of the building's purpose for the seafaring onlooker; no "face," in Campbell's words. Therefore, solidifying the seaside wall — and emblazoning its exterior with the museum's moniker in large, luminous letters — would provide the Menino Room with ample surface area for a special exhibit or traveling exhibition of one artist at a time, enabling us to see that artist's oeuvre in continuity from end to end and back again.

Photograph by Wallygva
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

(This could be seen as a linear version of the great spiraling ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York. This 1959 curvilinear concrete masterpiece benefits from being windowless, for the continuity of wall space Wright intended for viewing an artist's work from start to finish without barrier or corner interruptions, except for the thin, eave-concealed ribbons of glass that illuminate the artwork from above.)

Between the layers

So what lurks behind the blank walls and doors of the middle floors? I'll tell you: two very fluid, functional spaces that serve their purposes very well but don't contribute to a satisfying totality of visual experience in the museum.

Photograph by Christopher Peterson — www.christopherpeterson.com

On the second floor is the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater. Three glass curtain walls bring in harbor sun and sea as a breathtaking backdrop to any performance or presentation. In this way the walls "extend" the stage outside onto the bleachers, which step down to the Harborwalk beneath the gallery overhang, continuing the descent of the theater's rows of seats toward the water.

Photograph by Christopher Peterson — www.christopherpeterson.com

This inside-outside bridge is enhanced by a continuity of wood that envelops the bleachers, stage and seating, as a natural neutralizer of the mechanical mundaneness of the cables, lights, poles, rails and metal framework. The wood also celebrates Boston Harbor history as the material that built its wharves and ships. Yet wood-warmth and steel sterility are like oil and water, and we warm up to the wood up close but hardly notice it from afar, because of how the steel structure shelters it in shadow.

On the third floor is the Mediatheque, a computer lab where the ICA's collection can be viewed on screen. The rows of computer workstations step downward with the bleachers so that the room diagonally pops out from under the gallery cantilever. This yields a direct glass-wall view of the harbor water for the effect of a mobile painting, a glass-bottom boat, a cabin-cruiser trip, or wherever your artistic imagination takes you.

What does it all stack up to?

Photograph by Christopher Peterson — www.christopherpeterson.com

The ICA's communion with the harbor is clear in other ways as well. Its glass faces mirror the clarity of the water. The cantilever's prominent horizontality parallels that of the seascape, the wharves, and neighbors such as the Boston World Trade Center. Yet the ICA's articulation of its individual parts, and its awkward internal transitions between them, precludes it from stacking up to a coherent unity. Furthermore, the visual emphasis of its bleachers, Mediatheque and Menino Room over its entrance makes it appear to be built backwards, and may mislead newcomers into thinking its harbor front is its entrance.

Photograph by Garrett A. Wollman

Compare this to its predecessor, the old ICA on Boylston Street in the Back Bay (now part of Boston Architectural College), built in 1887 as a police-fire station from a Richardsonian Romanesque design by city architect Arthur Vinal. The police section was renovated in 1975 by architect Graham Gund, who masterfully mined a fluid, soaring interior out of the historic foursquare shell. The station's grand entrance arch provided a clear, dignified intro to the museum off the street, like the museums mentioned above. The old building's Arts and Crafts influence made a strong artistic statement appropriate to its new use, and the naturalistic hues and tactile surfaces of the brick and brownstone made it an organic whole greater than the sum of its parts.

This is where its successor falls short, scoring on the parts but skimping on the whole, clarifying its diverse functions but discounting the unifying elements of an enticing entrance and an artistic continuum essential to a museum experience. In this way the ICA is courteous to its surroundings but discourteous to its visitors.

For more information on the Institute of Contemporary Art, visit www.icaboston.org.

Let there be light

2009-06-25T15:16:00.001-07:00

And there was light at the end of the tunnel on last Saturday's Common Boston Weekend tour of the three new MBTA stations at the end of Dorchester's Red Line branch, which mark the end of an era of descent into darkness to alight from or crowd into a train.

From left, the new Fields Corner, the renovated Shawmut and the new Ashmont stations give Grand Central glory to your southbound commute and serve as dignified gateways to their respective neighborhoods.

Yep, Cambridge Seven Associates have done it again.

These architectural masterhands behind such luminary landmarks as the Forest Hills and Porter Square T stations have mastered the art of making light out of shadow and lightness out of heft. Just as they had demonstrated with the spiraling aquatic tank ramp they had carved out of the concrete cavern of their New England Aquarium and the soaring atrium space they had scooped out of the granite-block cell-block confinement of the old Charles Street Jail when reforming it as the Liberty Hotel.

By similarly lightening up the Fields Corner, Shawmut and Ashmont T stations, C7A have liberated commuters from the dank, stuffy sheds they used to arrive at or depart from for decades. They are now treated to a bright, warm welcome into, or bon voyage from, their neighborhoods.

FIELDS CORNER

In the shelter of thy wings
f

Since its opening on November 5, 1927, the Fields Corner station had been a creepy climb to a dungeon-like depot of a waiting platform, and this concrete bunker-box had stood cheek-to-jowl with an abutting three-decker, imposing daily train-roar on its occupant.

Now the platform is lightly shaded by feathery wingspan awnings of translucent polymer plastic that shed longed-for light on one's train wait, and end the three-decker's 80-year wait for elbow-room and breathing space. There's more of that in the station's new gray-granite entrance floor, which is cool without being cavernous, owing to the glass walls and halogen lighting.

Not only does Fields Corner II broaden commuters' tunnel vision, but — in true modernist spirit — it externally expresses its lightness of being, as well as its meteorological functions. The louver curtains foretell the feathery fineness that awaits you on the platform before you take off to work, while mitigating polar winds and letting the sun shine in, in stark contrast to the old station's somber solidity. The glass curtain walls also let the neighbors in, giving you a clear view of where you're getting off as you roll into the station.

Also connecting the station to its neighborhood are the new accessible walkways and clearly identified entrance points from both main cross streets. The walkways include Charles Park, a linear field of grass and plantings that makes your approach along Charles Street to the station a true "fields corner" more pleasant than the graffiti-prone concrete corridor of yore. The busway, too, has been lowered for the direct bus-to-station access our worklife demands.

Vive la différence!
h
Shawmut Station was named for the old Shawmut Branch Railroad that originally ran through here. Incorporated in 1870, the railroad was taken over by the Old Colony Railroad in 1872. The Old Colony and then the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad operated on the Shawmut Branch until September 4, 1926, when the Metropolitan Transit Authority (precursor to the MBTA) took over the branch as the first leg of its Dorchester Extension from Andrew Square in South Boston to Columbia (now JFK/UMass), Savin Hill and Fields Corner, extending to Shawmut in 1927 and Ashmont in 1928. The extension was run along the Old Colony Railroad mainline in a depressed right-of-way that put the Shawmut station underground.

Why underground? For the simple reason that area residents were NIMBY-nervy about the new subway rumble-roaring and clickety-clacking through their neighborhood (as the Old Colony had done), keeping them awake and depreciating their property values. The result: a cut-and-cover concrete right-of-way that lay dormant and waiting for a linear park or pedestrian path for decades — until recently.

Yes, the Shawmut Station renovation included an approach — an allée, shall we say — toward it on an axis aligned with the station's symmetrical composition. This grants the old station a French Renaissance ambiance, heightened by its original festoon relief panels and curlicue sign bookends, its architecturally compatible new handicapped-access elevators, and especially the new curtain-wall windows interspersed between the polished granite columns — some of them taken from the old Savin Hill station (left) when it was removed. This "French windows" effect brightens your entry with the lofty, delicate dignity of the Sun King's (Louis XIV) Versailles palace. Vive la différence from the bricked-up cavern the station used to be!

En esprit de Versailles et des Tuileries, the right-of-way segment from Centre Street to Melville Avenue is botanically bordered by the Shawmut Garden, a community-maintained oasis of 36 medicinal plant species, selected for their herbal healing value to calm your walk to and from the T before or after a stressful workday, and to make you feel safer in the neighborhood.
The plants appear on a seasonal rotational basis: in winter, we see witch hazel and yew; in spring, hawthorn, St. John's wort and yarrow; in summer, angelica, black cohosh and blueberry bushes; in the fall, fringe tree, lavender and juniper. Funded by the City of Boston's Department of Neighborhood Development in conjunction with the MBTA, this lovely garden is the fruit of a long-term collaboration among architects, artisans, community advocates designers, elected officials, scientists and teachers.

Learn more about the Shawmut Garden from the free brochure available in a box beside the garden's notice kiosk or the informational signs posted by each plant, or by joining the maintenance crew from 10 a.m. to noon on the first Saturday of each month.

ASHMONT

Light at the end of the tunnel

Before-and-after, indeed! The left-hand photo is the way I remember Ashmont station in the 1970s, when I was a ninth-grader traveling by T to Milton Academy for an interview there. Though at ground-level, the station felt like an extension of the tunnel. Adding to that effect was the train's gradual upward incline from Shawmut to Ashmont, which was so incremental it didn't feel like up-and-out, but more like a Swiss train's level exit from a mountain — without the alpine air and ambiance, of course.

However, the other two images show real light at the end. When completed (this year, they say), the new Ashmont station will boast a wingspan roof soaring on the diagonal like the feather-flight of Fields Corner, upheld by a tensile truss skeleton of steel tubes and a regiment of thin columns between translucent screen walls. This will create a light-filled cathedral terminal with escalators and elevators. Lobby entrances will anchor each end, one approached from Peabody Square by an open plaza walkway similar to Shawmut's. The new elevated busway is level with the lobbies. This bounty of breathing room will ease commuters' transition between down-under and up-and-out, as a welcome-to-Dorchester gesture.

I could feel the difference already as the train transitioned me from tunnel to terminal. The tunnel now bursts open into a lofty atrium where sun streams down from the translucent mesh screens in-between the columns, giving me a panoramic preview of the neighborhood above. Gone is the black box of the concrete cavern the station had been on the day of my Milton interview.

What goes around, comes around
y

But gone is a convenience, too — the ease of darting straight across the platform from the Red Line to the Ashmont-Mattapan High-Speed Line (left photo), which has now been rerouted to an upper-level platformed loop off to one end of the station (center and right photos). An understandable (and perhaps inevitable) move, but one that increases the risk of missing either train because you now have to take the escalator, elevator or stair from one to the other. (This would frustrate Milton students, for it is the trolley they depend on to get to school.)

Nonetheless, it's still the Ashmont-Mattapan High-Speed Line, remarkably unchanged since it opened on August 26, 1929, along the remainder of the Old Colony's Shawmut Branch right-of-way and part of its Dorchester-Milton Branch. Never giving way to the Light Rail Vehicle (LRV), it retains its old 1940s-50s PCC cars, restored and repainted in their original orange, as a living museum of the era when Charlie couldn't get off the train because he didn't have the exit fare. (Actually, he could get off this one, as it was free at the time of my Milton visit.)

But no more are they what Pogo's gang made of them:

No, these archaic barrels have been retrofit with state-of-the-art heating and air-conditioning — so they no longer feel like saunas in the summer and walk-in refrigerators in the winter — as well as the new electronic fareboxes. (Sorry, Charlie.) But their barrel-vaulted ceilings, demi-saucer lighting, fibrous plastic seating and chromium hardware deck us all with Boston Charlie as they had done when he froze on his because he didn't have that one more nickel. (Maybe his wife should have handed him chicken soup, rather than a sandwich, as his train came a-rumblin' through Scollay Square. Or maybe that extra nickel.) Now we could enjoy our journey through the hinterlands of Dorchester, Milton and Mattapan in solid comfort as well as living history.

"High-Speed" indeed — so called not because it's faster than the Red Line, but because it runs on its own track, free from auto-traffic gridlock and traffic-light stops — just like the Green Line's Riverside 'D' train on the old Boston & Albany Railroad's Highland Branch — save for two street-crossings at Central Avenue and Capen Street. Also, its comparatively infrequent use means fewer rush-hour slowdowns in service — and those old PCC cars, of course, have always been less prone to breakdowns than their hi-tech successors, especially their first-born...

Who remembers the fits and starts those 1977 LRV techno-trolleys had that gave their passengers fits when their sliding doors stuck, their air-brakes jammed, their motors went kaput, their air-conditioners leaked, their PA systems sounded off like bullhorns or fuzzed up like BearCats, or they jumped the rail? Not to mention the chips and rips — pieces broken off the polymer plastic seats, slits slashed through their polyvinyl cushies, whole ones ripped out so you got foam on your fanny. (Boeing-Vertol should have stuck to airplanes.)

But I digress — especially since the LRV never made it to Mattapan. (If it had, its line would no longer be High-Speed.) Anyway, here is stop number one at...

So called because of its procession through Cedar Grove Cemetery, the only Boston train to cut through a graveyard. But this cryptal crossing is soon redeemed by the life-affirming landscape of the Neponset River and its lush green wetlands as we approach...

BUTLER

The Butler Street station serves its area well with immediate access to its serene, tree-resplendent neighborhood and a community notice kiosk that introduces the neighborhood and broadcasts its news and notes. Just like a butler, the kiosk cordially greets guests at the approach from the station and ushers them into the main social realm by way of a tree-shaded triangular park and a pedestrian path.

Enter the Milton Lofts of the Lower Mills. Here the Neponset meanders like a millstream amid the industrial grandeur of the Dorchester Lower Mills Historic District and Baker's Chocolate Factory. This, believe it or not, was America's first chocolate mill and factory, co-founded by the Irishman who first introduced chocolate to the United States, John Hannon, who imported beans from the West Indies and refined them in Dorchester in collaboration with physician/ investor Dr. James Baker. The Walter Baker Chocolate Factory operated until 1965, then was converted to condos, for which the Romanesque arches, quoined brick façades and neo-Georgian WALTER BAKER counting house are suited to the new loft luxury. The local houses, too, get richer-looking, confirming our departure from Dorchester and migration into...

MILTON

On the big day of my Milton interview, I disembarked here to wait for the academy's free student shuttle, where we pushed and shoved to claim a seat before it filled up and the losers risked being late for school. (By the way, I wasn't accepted. Probably just as well.) Snubbed by million-dollar Milton, we chug alongside the graffiti-ridden Milton Bike Trail, and land smack in the middle of...

CENTRAL AVENUE

Here the trolley bisects the avenue perpendicularly — the quintessential RAIL ROAD CROSSING of small-town America. And backward in time this neighborhood is: Central Cleaners still emblazons its starched-white '70s sign... a relic from the time my sixth-grade class waited here for a train to head back to school from a field trip. Or, rather, I kept them waiting, because a grocery clerk kept me waiting to pay for a couple of Slim Jims... until one of our teachers stormed into the store, snatched the Slim Jims from my hand, slammed them on the counter and scooted me out the door and back to my classmates — but too late. The train clacked by, the class got peeved, and Josh grumped that there wouldn't be another one for half an hour... though it probably wasn't that long a wait. After all, this was a "high-speed line," which now high-speeds into the lowlands of...
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VALLEY ROAD

"Down in the valley, the valley so low..." This station really feels like it's down in a valley in contrast to its street-level predecessor and successor. Its high flight of cement steps (resembling those that gave Laurel and Hardy a hard time trying to lug a piano all the way up to a mountaintop mansion in The Music Box, pictured right), its concrete retaining walls, and its steep hillsides of trees obscure all signs of civilization until we level off again at...

CAPEN STREET

This street bisects the track at an angle, which brings the neighborhood closer to the stop than at Central, making the trolley as neighborly (and noisy) as the streetcar of yore — now what are a green car and a green sign doing on the Red Line??? At left is an older image of Capen Street before the trolleys were refurbished and repainted in historically correct orange, and when they were still running on the Green Line before the LRVs condemned them to the carbarn, the scrapheap, the Boylston Station mini- museum, and, of course, Mattapan's rattle-rail. The green sign — likely a manufacturer's goof (but an understandable one: the High-Speed and Riverside lines are indistinguishable for a stretch) — has since been rectified in red, reaffirming our rightness of route as we red-line into...

MATTAPAN

Quite the changeover, eh? Again, an old, dark, gritty, crumbling, paint-challenged station, not so different from the carbarn that's still there (complete with cannibalized PCC parts on hand for when a car gives out, since they don't make 'em the way they used to), gives way to the airy brightness of an open platform. We're butlered into it by the crystal-cleanliness of a contemporary aluminum archway, while the gritty old stone station (now a Domino's Pizza) still stands off to the side as a memento of the rail's Old Colony heritage. Open, red-accented canopies resembling Chinese spare ribs end our journey with a gesture of oriental delicacy and diplomacy.

In the shadow of Old Mattapan Station

In the sunshine of New Mattapan Station

Haffenreffer incorporated

2009-06-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

The Haffenreffer Brewery is a massive mumbo- jumbo of diverse chockablock structures built from the 1870s to the 1950s according to the beer brewer's evolving needs, without regard to architectural unity or spatial coherence. Over time this yielded a labyrinthine layout that would drive Laverne and Shirley to drink and Lenny and Squiggy nuts.

Strange brew

But now that Haffenreffer has closed up shop and merged with Narragansett (who else? — same number of letters, two sets of double letters), the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation has incorporated the old brewery's diversity of digs into a handsome neighborhood of businesses, including a dance studio, a café, a gym, a cleaning company, three cabinetmakers, a food supplier, and — in keeping with tradition — Sam Adams Brewery. On last Saturday's Common Boston-sponsored tour of the complex, Andy Waxman of the JPNDC and Gail Sullivan of Studio G Architects showed us how Baker/Wohl Architects ingeniously interconnected the structures by busting through walls and installing stairs going up and down from one building's second, third, fourth or fifth floor to the other's. Floor levels didn't match from building to building, and historical guidelines demanded as-is preservation of almost all of them. They range from a low mansard brick counting house retaining its "Night Depository" safe door, a towering castle-like main building (the office complex entrance), a wood clapboard horse stable for the Clydesdales that delivered beer by wagon in days of yore, and a corrugated metal hangar-like doohickey for storage of kegs, barrels, forklifts and the like.

Brewer's gold

Not to mention the yellow-brick smokestack that continues to landmark the site, but in truncated form: safety concerns caused its decapitation, and it awaits a repaint so it can once again read "FENREFFER BREWERY."

The interior shows how adaptable the high ceilings and the vast floor spaces, created by iron columns taking the place of load-bearing masonry walls, are to the building's new uses. And what a museum of construction history: brick walls (retaining much of their paint because sandblasting is now a historical no-no), wood beams, concrete beams, steel beams, iron posts and rails, stenciled-on indicator signs ("HOP STRAINER 30BB"), a wood-deck ceiling with skylight, an old metal track door, and especially a handsome Victorian cast-iron stair with arcaded risers and acorn-topped newel post. And don't forget Sam Adams' beer-barrels!

Making their dreams come true, indeed! And doing it their way!

Welcome to ArchiTalk!

2009-06-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

First, a little about myself. I've been an architecture buff off and on since childhood. I credit my architectural appreciation to my father, the late Leslie Larson, who was an architect in the Frank Lloyd Wright genre with Japanese and Scandinavian influences thrown in. He designed warm-wooded, soft-lit, clean-lined homes, apartments and offices for such figures as Tony Bennett, Norman Cousins, David Rockefeller, million-dollar corporate attorney Martin Lipton, and renowned psychologist Eric T. Carlson. When we moved from New York to Boston, my father became a consultant on renovations of historic properties. His magnum opus in both departments was Maison Robert, an upscale French bistro he designed as part of the adaptive reuse of Boston's Old City Hall. (The restaurant closed in 2004, and Ruth's Chris Steak House now occupies its space.)

But I really become a captive fan (fan-atic, I might say) of architecture in recent years, ever since reading Paul Goldberger's 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning book On the Rise and being awestruck by the precision of his prose and the art of his "architext." I went on to study architecture history and theory at Harvard and Boston Architectural College, and to write about architecture for numerous publications, most recently "Home of the Week" profiles in the Executive Domains section of the Boston Business Journal. Prior to that I was doing the same for the Wellesley Townsman and the Needham Times, until budget cuts demolished that part of my job (and I eventually got laid off). In fact, I've amassed quite a paper trail, having also written for the Cambridge Chronicle, the TAB, the Improper Bostonian, Boston Homes, Banker & Tradesman, the Boston Business Journal, MassBuilder, Greater Boston Builder, and Victorian Homes, among others.

Now I'm frantically chasing after freelance gigs to build that portfolio further up, and I thought getting an architectural blog going would keep me writing away until the mags, papers and journals began to come my way again, and help me generate some story ideas. I was also eager to share my love of architecture with the world, and I thought a blog would be the most inviting, least intrusive way to do so, after ruling out an e-newsletter as too spammish and a paper pub as too spendthrifty.

So I hope you enjoy my blog and gain some new insights and hindsights (and lose some oversights) into the ins, outs, ups, downs, back alleys, side streets and front lawns of the architectural space that surrounds, astounds and hounds you, where there's always so much to see, spot, observe, learn, discover, find out, unturn, unravel, unveil, uncover, unearth, and stare you in the face. For architecture is the world we live in, really, so we might as well revel in it while we're still here, no?

The adventure begins...