BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

Notwithstanding the influential career of Henry Hobson Richardson, the 19th century
ended in Boston with the construction of one of the most important buildings in the
history of American architecture: McKim, Mead and White’s Boston Public Library
(1895). This “People’s Palace,” designed in the form of an Italian Renaissance palace,
monumentalizes the importance of education in a city self-consciously marking its
preeminence in the various fields of learning. Using Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste.-
Geneviève (1850) in Paris as his model, Charles McKim created an American paragon of
Beaux-Arts design, integrating architecture, sculpture, murals, mosaics, and stained glass
into an aesthetic whole.
The neoclassical architecture displayed at the Boston Public Library and the World’s
Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago led to a renaissance of this style across the
country. Boston embraced the planning principles of the “White City” with its “Boston-
1915” movement, a Progressive Era crusade to remake the city by the year 1915. The
most important legacy of this City Beautiful movement was the creation of the Boston
Planning Board (see Kennedy, 1992) and buildings such as Shepley, Rutan and
Coolidge’s Harvard Medical School (1907), Guy Lowell’s Museum of Fine Arts (1909),
and William Welles Bosworth’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus
(1916), called the “great white city” on the Charles River.
During the early years of skyscraper design, Boston lagged behind Chicago and New
York in technological innovation. Most notably, Boston preferred not to erect numerous
tall buildings. The most important historicized skyscraper in Boston from the early 20th
century was the Custom House tower (1915) by Peabody and Stearns. A federal structure,
the tower was not limited to Boston’s height restrictions.
The first Art Deco skyscraper to appear in Boston was the United Shoe Machinery
Building (1930) by Parker, Thomas and Rice. Mingled among the more recent glass box
skyscrapers of Boston’s financial district, one still finds a number of step-back forms,
notably Cram and Ferguson’s U.S. Post Office (1931). Boston architect Ralph Adams
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Cram was best known for his Gothic Revival ecclesiastical work in Boston and around
the United States, including collegiate designs for Princeton University and West Point.
Cram’s medievalism contrasts sharply with progressive architectural design, which
began in earnest with the arrival of leading modernist Walter Gropius in 1937. Gropius
became chairman of the Department of Architecture at Harvard University from 1938 to
1952 and reorganized the program along Bauhaus lines, transforming American
architectural education in the process. The residence that Gropius built for himself (1938,
with Marcel Breuer) in the suburb of Lincoln, Massachusetts, features an International
Style flat roof, ribbon windows, and a factory aesthetic that was new to the New England
landscape. Gropius formed The Architects’ Collaborative (TAG) in 1945, an
experimental group of architects responsible for the Graduate Center at Harvard (1950).
Not long after the ascendancy of Gropius at Harvard came alternatives to the
International Style with Alvar Aalto’s Baker House (1949) at MIT, a student dormitory
featuring a serpentine plan and brick facade, and Eero Saarinen’s Kresge Auditorium
(1955) and Kresge Chapel (1955), also on the MIT campus. Aalto’s dormitory is
especially significant, as it is one of only two Aalto-designed buildings in the United
States. Like those at other campuses, these buildings are examples of postwar campus
expansion at Boston-area colleges and universities. The European influence on American
architecture continued with Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, the Carpenter
Center for the Visual Arts (1963) on the Harvard campus. Constructed of reinforced
concrete, the building’s effect is quite sculptural with its play of voids and solids on the
facade. Characteristic of Le Corbusier is the prominent ramp that extends through the
center of building. Sited among Harvard’s traditional brick buildings along Quincy
Street, the Carpenter Center seems strikingly noncontextual at the dawn of the 21st
century.
Le Corbusier’s colleague, José Luis Sert, succeeded Gropius as dean of Harvard’s
architecture program from 1953 to 1969 and brought modern urban design principles to
the city. Despite the lack of original Le Corbusier designs in Boston, his impact on the
city’s architecture was enormous. The prime example is the Boston City Hall (1968) by
the then-unknown architectural firm of Kallman, McKinnell and Knowles, who won the
national competition with a design based on Le Corbusier’s Monastery of La Tourette
(1955) in France. Although the American Institute of Architects voted City Hall the sixthgreatest
building in American history in 1976, the fortresslike concrete structure in the
Brutalist style and its vacant, windswept plaza have been a source of criticism among
populists over the years.
The construction of the Boston City Hall was part of a massive urbanrenewal
campaign that remade the city in the 1950s and 1960s. The first
target was the city’s west end, a crowded immigrant neighborhood
demolished in the 1950s and replaced with complexes such as Paul
Rudolph’s State Health, Education and Welfare Service Center (1970).
The destruction of this lively streetscape has since served as a lesson for
city planners, urging subsequent generations to respect Boston’s unique
scale and layout. Urban renewal continued in the 1960s with the “New
Boston” program under Mayor John F.Collins and Boston Redevelopment Authority Director Edward Logue with the demolition of Scollay Square,
an area notorious for tattoo parlors and burlesque entertainment. Replacing such urban
blight was the new Government Center (1960, master plan designed by I.M.Pei and
Partners), a complex of modern buildings dominated by City Hall.
One outcome of postwar urban renewal in Boston was an increased interest in historic
preservation. Preservation in Boston was not new; the Society for the Preservation for
New England Antiquities (SPNEA), founded by William Sumner Appleton, had been
purchasing and restoring colonial architecture since its establishment in 1910. Outraged
by the large-scale destruction of the west end in the 1950s, preservationists rallied for
saving historic structures throughout the city. Boston became a leader in this movement,
and adaptive re-use became a viable alternative to demolition. A prime example is the old
Boston City Hall (1865), originally designed by Arthur Gilman and Gridley J. Fox Bryant
in the French Renaissance Revival style and renovated into offices and a restaurant in
1970 by Anderson, Notter Associates.
Preserving the historic character of Copley Square was the challenge faced by Henry
Cobb of I.M.Pei and Associates in designing the tallest skyscraper in Boston, the John
Hancock Tower (1975). Two of Boston’s most important historic buildings, the Boston
Public Library and Henry Hobson Richardson’s Trinity Church (1877), face each other
across the Square. A site to the south of the church became the location of the Hancock
Tower, a 60-story reflective-glass-surface skyscraper. Cobb angled the building with the
shortest facade of the trapezoidal structure facing Copley Square so that the enormous
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building would minimally impact Trinity Church. Although considered by many to be
aesthetically successful, the building has had more than its share of structural and
engineering problems, leading to the complete replacement of all its reflective-glass
windows (see Robert Campbell’s [1988] interview with structural engineer William Le
Messurier).
The 1980s witnessed a building boom in Boston in which oversized developments
sometimes caused community backlash. A case in point is the 500 Boylston Street project
(1989), a Postmodern high-rise designed by John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson.
Public outcry was directed against the building’s proximity to Trinity Church and its
shadow-casting enormity. As a result, only half of the one-block complex was completed
before Robert Stern was asked to step in and design the second tower at 222 Berkeley
Street (1989), complete with Postmodernist historical references. Other important
Postmodern Boston buildings include 75 State Street (1988, Graham Gund and Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill), an Art Deco revival skyscraper, and Philip Johnson’s International
Place (1992) with its repetitive facade of Palladian windows.
History continues to play an important part in the architecture of the city, as it did with
the construction of the Beaux-Arts Boston Public Library at the close of the 19th century.
At the beginning of the 21st century, restoration, preservation, and historicism continue
to abide in this historic American city.