Letter from Boston

Boston has a fine nineteenth-century and Modernist past, but sadly contemporary developments do not reflect this rich architectural and urban legacy.

In the last decade, Boston has become a major global financial center, smaller in size to only New York, London and Tokyo, but it would be a stretch at best to name an important architectural creation that has received much worldwide acclaim. Ironically this state of affairs exists in a city that even when it was suffering economic decline was home to outstanding architecture. At Copley Square alone Boston has three buildings -- the Boston Public Library by McKim, Mead and White, Trinity Church by H. H. Richardson and the Hancock Tower by Harry Cobb of Pei, Cobb & Freed -- that in their day were among the best known and most important examples of American architecture.

Where once Boston revelled in standing out architecturally, it seems now to want to fit in. And, in Boston, 'fitting in' means what my colleague Richard Marshall calls the 'aesthetic of the acceptable, the safe and the known', which in Boston usually means red brick referencing Boston's nineteenth-century architecture and rejecting the unapologetically modern or different. It is a city whose builders (architects and developers) with all their considerable talent and imagination seem unable to provide the adventuresome, the new or the distinctive in their architecture. Even as Boston expands its global reach and becomes like everywhere else and home to name brand stores, up-scale in city malls, boutique restaurants and a rapidly gentrifying center causing a major housing crisis for the working and middle classes, its conservatism does keep it unique. Where in other cities new developments like Niketown add architectural glitz, in Boston it is just another reddish building trying desperately to fit into its surrounding context. New high-tech firms while creating cutting-edge technologies opt to build the most banal and conservative of buildings. Take for example Genzyme, a new biotechnology firm, which has built as its new headquarters a mock red brick nineteenth-century warehouse masquerading as a cathedral. I am not by nature in favor of glitz and certainly a sense of context that keeps Boston unique is salutary, but when you live in Boston long enough you begin to ask why does contextual have to be so boring -- even architecturally oppressive?

Why Boston today is so suspicious of the modern and the new is a mystery. Boston has a wonderful legacy of fine and successful buildings from the '60s when it was a center of Modernism and the new in America. The Carpenter Art Center by Le Corbusier (his only building in America), Aalto's MIT Dorm, Saarinen's Chapel and Kresge Auditorium, Ben Thompson's Design Research Building are all wonderfully urban and still well used and appreciated. Walter Gropius at the GSD educated a whole raft of important Modernists during this period. Add to that the somewhat later design for the Christian Science Center with its wonderfully urbane public space and I have always wondered why it is that Bostonians, architects among them, continue to harp on about buildings and designs they see as failures like the Boston City Hall. The winners certainly outpace the losers in this period. Bostonians still talk about the Hancock Tower's problems with falling glass while visitors to the city look at it with mouths agape.

Communities might be forgiven their suspicion of any urban design interventions. As architect Carol Burns has pointed out, the memory is still strong of the devastation caused by the West End Urban Renewal Project which levelled a perfectly viable neighborhood and displaced over 30 000 people and replaced them with the most banal of modern buildings in a park. And so it should be. But it is not so clear to me that the political 'leadership' that might help Bostonians rethink their city as it enters the new millennium should so rarely lead but prefer instead to wait for the support of the community. Nor is it so clear that the local architectural community should be so unwilling to challenge Boston's conservatism.

In Boston, projects that would take a reasonably long time to develop elsewhere often appear to take forever to be realized. Long debates and community objections more often than not sap initial energy. Projects like the convention center, a complete waste of the city's resources in my view, amends the potentially interesting design proposal by Rafael Vinoly because of lack of funds. The (as of now $13 billion, it continues to rise in cost) suppression of the Central Artery, a major highway through the center of the city that originally called for plans for creating a new and bold landscape for Boston, is also due to funding.

That communities act as guardians of traditional spaces and places might be beneficial in a world in which change, no matter its consequences, is often the benchmark of the good. But it isn't so if just about any community group is allowed to act as a brake on most any design that does not fit into their conservative view of their self-interest. A recent imaginative design fur the Boston Center for the Arts that will knit together what has been a blight on one of Boston's more energetic neighborhoods has been put on hold for about two years by a community' of a few house owners who feel that the service entrance will create too much traffic. Architecture and urban design is thus forced to respond not only to public confrontations but just about any public comment no matter how small or self-interested.