Stumbling upon this Instagram image of Frank Lloyd Wright standing before a model of an office tower (left), I was struck by its striking resemblance to World Trade Center West in Boston's Seaport District (above), as if the latter were derivative of the former. If so, it was about time something Wrightian surfaced in Boston, where Wright never practiced, despite his far-reaching influence across the American map and Boston's reputation as a major architects' mecca. The closest he got to the Hub was his Theodore Baird Residence in Amherst for an Amherst College professor, and his Zimmerman and Toufic H. Kalil houses in Manchester, N.H. Otherwise, he steered clear of Beantown, perhaps finding its architecture too old-hat to find a progressive niche there.
But the hills of San Francisco were clearly not too passé for Wright's far-reaching ambitions, for this 1912 model was intended for the unbuilt San Francisco Call Building for one of the city's most widely circulated newspapers. It was a pure celebration of skyscraper verticality, alternating slender piers and fenestration stacks, climaxing in a wing-like cantilevered cornice pierced with openings to let the sun's rays filter onto the façade for an added effect of light.
Doesn't that look familiar in the Seaport? The cantilevered cornice pierced with sun-emitting holes is right there, as is the vertical emphasis of the lean piers and upright window strips. Yet the architects, Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood, were certainly not out to be copycats of Wright. They were out to put their own postmodern stamp of squared columns articulating the building structure on World Trade Center West, as it pertained to its district's maritime ambiance. In their words, "The form, language, and materials of the building relate to the maritime character of the site. The weighty masonry, substantial cornice and protective canopies recall the adjacent warehouses and pier buildings, while the steel construction and wind mitigation 'sails' of the lower building refer to the ships, cranes and bridges of the harbor."
The bowfront (deviating from Wright's flush façade) allowed occupants that full harbor view, and its elegant vertical lines clearly expressed the upward mobility of not only the building, but also its district. For this was one of the first buildings built in Seaport, in 2003, to kick off a new Boston neighborhood with innovative architecture, along with the over-the-water cantilever of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Institute of Contemporary Art, the welcoming horizontal canopy thrust of Rafael Viñoly's Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, the open-armed circular wingspread and concave curtain wall of Harry Cobb's John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, and the curvilinear curtain wall of SOM's Manulife Financial headquarters. These environmental characteristics that determined World Trade Center West's form are certainly a far cry from Wright, who was tailoring his flat, razor-thin San Francisco Call Building for a densely settled, hilly community that was just starting to be on the up and up, long before the Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid became its skyborne iconography.
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Wainwright Building (1891, Louis Sullivan), St. Louis, MO.
Photo by W. LeMay (CC BY-SA 2.0). |
But another thing both Call and WTCW have in common is their apparent inspiration from Louis Henry Sullivan, which I discussed in a post last year. Wright himself called Sullivan's Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Missouri, "the very first human expression of a tall steel office-building as Architecture." And he should have known, having worked in Sullivan's office, until accepting private commissions caused Sullivan to expel him – and propel him to become America's greatest architect. The influence of the Wainwright's squared vertical piers and window stacks and boldly embroidered cornice on both Call and WTCW is obvious, in their upward expressions of verticality, cantilevered climaxes, and smooth-skinned delicacy. For that was what Sullivan meant by "form follows function": a skyscraper's soaring vertical form is shaped by its function as a tall office building.
That is how World Trade Center West is paying tribute to two pioneering architects who never practiced in Boston (though Sullivan was born there, and Wright briefly lived in Weymouth as a child) by bringing their spirits into Boston as a living demonstration of their long-standing influence on office-building design regarding the clear, honest expression of structure, the smooth soar of the verticality of building upward into the sky to get as much office space on a limited footprint as possible, and the presentation of such a building as a monument to America's economic growth, the progress of architecture, the advancement of building materials (steel) to make those advancements possible, and, for WTCW, the nativity of a new neighborhood on the Boston Harbor where it all began.
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