Twin towers

Millennium Tower, Boston, 2016.
Architect: Blake Middleton of Handel Architects.
Photo: Beyond My Ken, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

One Dalton, Boston, 2019.
Architect: Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed Partners.
Photo: Edward Orde, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Not in the WTC or Petronas sense of the word. Just equally overscaled, overrated, intrusive, expensive, and just plain dull and forgettable—though, like the antecedent Prudential Tower, so omnipresent from everywhere you can't get them out of your head, and, unlike the precedent John Hancock Tower, lacking in contextual distinction and memorable form. 

Which makes it surprising that the Millennium Tower (left) in Boston's Downtown Crossing and One Dalton (right) in Boston's Back Bay got so many accolades when they opened in 2016 and 2019, respectively. For they share more common attributes with the unanimously reviled Pru than the universally praised Hancock (though one of them was designed, regrettably, by Hancock's architect).

Millennium monster

Millennium Tower near completion in 2016. Photo by Carter Hubert97, courtesy of Wiki.

Designed by Handel Architects, most famous for the 9/11 Memorial in New York, the Millennium Tower makes no sort of impression from a distance. When its glass facade (ho-hum, that's all that's built nowadays) regains its reflective powers, it resembles either a svelte version of a Bic cigarette lighter or a cluster of those shiny-new Sheaffer pens I got as a Christmas present ages ago but hardly took out of the jewel box, thus preserving their silvery-chrome luster to this day.

Such an appearance is an intrusion on the historic Boston skyline, to be sure, creating odd bedfellows with the historically elegant Park Street Church spire near it (top, left), the area's original and best "skyscraper." 

Nor is it compatible with the building it was part of the redevelopment of: the neoclassical Filene's (right), designed in 1914 by noted Chicago architecture pioneer Daniel Burnham, most renowned for its bargain basement where wedding gowns and prom tuxes could be had for rock-bottom wages. 

Let's face it—a penthouse condo that dropped for $45 million is so out of place here (which it is, physically, being way up there), beyond the clear clash of the glass with the historic ornamented masonry and pressed metal that refined the Filene's shopping experience, even for basement-bingers.

Dalton domination

Designed by Henry Cobb, renowned for the John Hancock Tower (1976) in the Back Bay and the John Joseph Moakley Courthouse (2004) in the Seaport District, One Dalton hardly lives up to the promise of those two groundbreaking buildings at all. 

In fact, it regresses to the thrown-up commonplaceness of one of his first Boston projects, Harbor Towers (1971), which essentially recycled modernist design elements that Mies Van der Rohe and Le Corbusier had already pioneered in Chicago's Lake Shore Drive Apartments and France's Unité d'Habitation, respectively.

Be honest: Would you really want to pay $34 million to live all the way up there? With nothing surrounding you all day but glass and sky, it would get pretty dull and lonely, wouldn't it?

Two World Trade Center (south tower) after being struck by United Airlines Flight 175
on September 11, 2001. Photo by Robert on Flickr, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Of course, a drop-in from an airplane is another matter...

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'Dream a little before you think'

No one but an architect—an imaginative one, that is—could manifest Toni Morrison's maxim "Dream a little before you think" most fully physically. This doesn't mean the boxy, regimented, cubical blah spitting out of draughtsmen's AutoCAD and SketchUp screens by the gazillion to resolve an urgent housing crisis, meet a client's deadline, or throw the blasted thing up ASAP. 

It's the architecture that swoops, swirls, swishes, glides the eye through space, wakes us to wonder, challenges our conception of being in a space by allowing us to truly experience it, celebrate it, revel in it, and wish we didn't have to return to the housebox we make our bed in.

Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT (2004, Frank Gehry). Photo by Laura Choate, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Stata Center main hallway. Photo by Alan Levine, courtesy of Flickr.

That would include Frank Gehry's Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dedicated in 2004, it's an extravaganza of excess in architectural agility. 

Walls bounce and rebound like Wham-O Superballs. Ceilings soar and sink like Soaring Sam gliders. Windows shoot out like spitballs. Bays bulge like obese bellies.

And all of this is the product of a dreamer who could translate his reveries to computer algorithms as the bridge to the thinking phase of his visions, so he could walk, chew gum, and blow bubbles all in one fell swoop of a Superball. 

And ballsy it is, compared to the geometric rigidity of virtually all the M.I.T. architecture that preceded it.

Stata Center sprinkler explosion, March 6, 2007. Photo by Yoyo Zhou, courtesy of Flickr.

But it turned out Gehry may have dreamed a little too much and didn't think enough about the technical snafus such a box-bursting design would inevitably cause, such as the sprinkler burst shown here—ironically, amid fish and circle sculptures with "messages on them that extol the virtues of water conservation," said the photographer, Yoyo Zhou.

Long room, Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin. Photo by Diliff, courtesy of Wikimedia.

Another architectural dreamboat—albeit on the classical side—is the Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College Library in Dublin. Built between 1712 and 1732 and roof-raised in 1860 for an upper gallery of books, it is the most bookish architecture imaginable, making a good 200,000 of the library's oldest volumes into wallcoverings of wonderment.

Jonathan Swift bust by Louis François Roubiliac at Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin.

It certainly realizes a dream of using architecture to stimulate the intellect by booking all walls solid with old tomes reaching back years and yores, whetting our intellectual curiosities about the sheer store of knowledge within those lines and lines of leather spines, with cerebral sparks from busts of great writers like Jonathan Swift (left).

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