by Douglass Shand-Tucci...Boston Public Library...to get a horrific neighbor...
Don Saklad
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/99/05/13/SKYLINE.html
[[[sidebar]]] *_The Boston Phoenix_*
*May 13 - 20, 1999*
[Features]
WHITEHILL'S LAW
MILLENNIUM PARTNERS' CONTROVERSIAL BACK BAY TOWER WILL BE A BOON TO
BOSTON. WHAT SHOULD BE DISTURBING IS THE ONGOING VULGARIZATION OF
COPLEY SQUARE. IT'S NOT HEIGHT OR DENSITY THAT MATTERS, BUT DESIGN.
by Douglass Shand-Tucci
*SKYLINE* News from the Back Bay. Bad news. It's time to tell the
powers that be in Boston's most prestigious quarter that they
haven't got a clue.
They're all up in arms against the building Millennium Partners
has proposed for Mass Ave at Boylston Street, a project designed
to renew and transform that ugliest of cityscapes. Even if it only
half succeeds, it cannot help but improve in-town Boston's closest
equivalent to East Berlin. Meanwhile, nobody seems to be minding
the store in Copley Square, that most beautiful of streetscapes, a
place celebrated everywhere for its architecture, yet soon to be
badly trashed.
Why is everybody looking the wrong way?
It is the size of the Millennium complex, known as Boylston
Square, that's scaring them. The fear is that, first, the new
center's density will generate too much congestion. Another worry
is that the skyscraper at the project's heart is too big at 59
stories -- tall for Boston.
Both fears seem to me not only irrational but dangerous. They bode
ill not just for the Back Bay but for Boston in general.
Now, I'm well aware that these fears speak to some legitimate
issues: street-level access, parking, infrastructure strain, and
so on -- issues space does not permit full discussion of in this
column. But these issues need to be addressed more positively.
How many stop to consider that whatever the total capacity of all
of Boylston Square's planned movie theaters, it is unlikely that
it will even equal the number of seats lost just in my lifetime to
uptown Boston, which used to have a galaxy of theaters, often
running films in tandem with the downtown theaters? Remember the
Loew's State, the Fenway, the Fine Arts, the Exeter, the Capri,
the Esquire, the Strand, and the Uptown? I suspect there are more
filmgoers living in the Back Bay and the South End today (who
would walk to and from the movies) than there were in the '60s and
'70s.
It was just such a fear of congestion, you'll recall, that lost us
I.M. Pei's magnificent glass pyramid, now a landmark of a greatly
revitalized Paris, where it stands in the Great Court of the
Louvre.
It should, of course, be glittering along the banks of the Charles
as the centerpiece of the Kennedy Library, for which it was
designed. Before, that is, our Brattle Street betters ran that
institution out of Cambridge and into Dorchester for fear of the
hordes -- which, by the way, have never materialized.
Having signaled my own opinion up front, let me call some
witnesses.
For the traffic question in cities generally, I'll call the
~Globe~'s Robert Campbell, a long-time observer of change and
growth in Boston. I don't know what Campbell's views on the
Millennium project are, but in his ~Cityscapes of Boston~, he has
cited our very unhappy experience of "pedestrianized" streets (the
malling of the city, I call it), protesting that "removing the
colorful moving cars from American streets was like stripping the
bright rotating toys from a baby's crib." The problem, writes
Campbell, is that when cars were banished, "sensory deprivation
ensued. Planners had forgotten that ~congestion is a virtue, not a
vice, of cities, and that most American downtowns have too little
of it, not too much~."
__ The emphasis is mine. I find myself thinking of Newbury Street
on a Friday evening. Does anyone think fewer cars would enhance
that lively urban scene? And how about all those traffic snarls
(complete with mounted police to make them worse -- but, surely,
more exciting too) at gala opening nights in the Theater District
or at Symphony Hall? I'd sooner loose the Klieg lights than the
traffic congestion.
On the corollary issue of urban planning, I'll call George Thrush,
head of the architecture program at Northeastern University. "A
radical leap forward in reconnecting our city" is the way he sees
the Millennium project, which he feels would "repair the street
corridors between Newbury and Boylston Streets along Massachusetts
Avenue and . . . re-attach strands of our `walking city' at a
point where the Turnpike and railroad sliced them apart."
Notice the similarity, as Thrush sees it, to what we're trying to
do in the Big Dig, which aims to re-attach the North End and the
waterfront downtown.
The most interesting aspect for me of Thrush's view, however, is
that he also sees the aesthetic aspect so many miss. The
skyscraper at the heart of Boylston Square, writes Thrush, will
~offer an excellent terminal view looking west on Boylston
and mark a grand entry to the city. This kind of judicious
use of slender towers as markers for different districts
in Boston could serve as a model for future development in
other parts of town.~
I could not agree more.
Awesomely poised and elegantly proportioned, the Millennium tower,
designed by Blake Middleton of Gary Edward Handel and Partners of
New York, is the best sort of urbanism, just as it is the best
sort of architecture. As Rodolfo Machado might say, it is
contextualism cast in the language not of historicism but of
modernism.
The design brings to mind the teachings of a third witness,
Boston's pre-eminent historian and preservationist in this
century, Walter Muir Whitehill.
If you have the sense every time someone starts on the "ghastly"
Millennium tower that you've heard it all before, you have --
about the Hancock Tower. The naysayers were wrong then, and
they're wrong now.
Listen to Whitehill, and when you do, remember that this was the
man who in the 1960s saved the Back Bay for us all. It was
Whitehill who arranged for the exhibition "The City as a Work of
Art" at the Museum of Fine Arts, and who made possible the
publication by Harvard University Press of Bainbridge Bunting's
seminal book on the area's Victorian townhouses. It was Whitehill,
too, who instigated the creation of the original Back Bay Historic
District. And what the father of preservation in the Back Bay had
to say about the Hancock Tower is just my point about Boylston
Square.
Faced then with the prospect of "the tallest building in New
England rising beside Trinity Church," a far more sensitive site
than the Millennium proposal's today, Whitehill pointed to the
Hancock's architecture: I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb, he wrote in the
second edition of ~Boston: A Topographical History~, showed "great
imagination" in that design. And as for the tower's height -- "To
me," wrote Whitehill, "at least one slender 60-story tower
clutters the skyline less than three 20-story buildings or four of
15."
Whitehill's Law, I'm willing to call it. It's not height nor
density that matters, but design. It's so obvious. But how little
we heed it. And nowhere are the disastrous results more readily
seen than in Copley Square itself.
The Hancock's design, Whitehill felt, would "enhance the local
scene, rather than detract from and dominate it," and so it
does. But notice what does not enhance Copley Square -- what, in
fact, detracts from it badly.
There's that revolting black-and-gold office building on the
corner of Boylston and Clarendon; its equally tacky red-brick
neighbor; the hideous green-and-white Hayden Building on the
corner of Boylston and Dartmouth; and, even more repulsive, 1
Exeter Place, a block further up at Boylston and Exeter. This last
is so loathsome a structure it has aptly been nicknamed the Darth
Vader building.
Copley Square has indeed been marred. But by its smallest and
lowest buildings, not by its biggest and tallest.
Even the Hancock's not without flaw, of course; it has its faults
just as surely as the Millennium tower will. Though perhaps it's
worth recalling that in the case of the Hancock its flaws are, as
the French say, the weaknesses of its strengths. There is the
wind; there are the shadows; but oh, the glory of it.
Copley Square seems not just to survive the hordes it generates,
but to be a more lively urban scene because of them.
Trinity Church, too, profits from the Hancock. The architectural
splendors of church and tower play off each other so well that
it's hard to find a Boston guide or tourist map -- or a history of
American architecture -- that doesn't celebrate the fact.
It's the Boston Public Library that is about to get a horrific
neighbor: the soon-to-be-erected Trinity Place tower on Blagdon
Street, beside the library. While so many are fixated on Boylston
Square, it is this building that will do the real damage.
If you want to see what's going to happen, walk up Boylston Street
to Fairfield, where stand two pertinent buildings. One (actually
inspired by the Copley Square library) is the Hynes Convention
Center, one of Boston's grandest modernist public buildings; the
other, the Prudential Center mall, one of Boston's more
conspicuous essays in postmodernism, is all gush and glitz, very
much in the manner of the projected Trinity Place. It's quite a
case study. Worth the walk. And a brief meditation on postmodern
architecture.
The measure of postmodernism (the worst of it, which is to say
nearly all of it) has been best taken, to my mind, by Alan Tempko,
the architecture critic of the ~San Francisco~ ~Chronicle~, whose
view is the more refreshing for its freewheeling West Coast
perspective.
Tempko has railed against the stage-set "fakery," the "vulgar
flash of the detailing," the typically "hot palette" of strident
colors, the frequently "conflicting lines and clamorous details,"
and, most pointedly of all, "the reactionary sentimentality" of
what he calls, unequivocally, "the architectural counterpart of
Reaganism in politics."
Prepare yourself. Trinity Place, I predict, is going to be a
stellar example, whether or not it will boast the synthetic
materials, stagy faux finishes, and general decorative excess so
characteristic of this type of work. You can depend upon it, for
so it discloses itself in the published drawings: Trinity Place is
stridently massed and crassly detailed, and is as vulgar as the
Boston Public Library is refined.
Schlock architecture? Wait until you see Trinity Place's companion
piece at 111 Huntington Avenue, which will affect I.M. Pei and
Araldo Cossutta's magnificent Christian Science Center in ways
that make me cringe. Even on paper, the design of this 36-story
tower yields that hollow feeling you get when you've looked too
long at -- nothing.
The real question is why Boston, after nearly two centuries at the
head of American architecture, is still so welcoming of such
stuff.
Boston's elite design firms will have nothing to do with it. You
won't, for example, find it on offer by Schwartz/Silver (the
designers of the new addition to the New England Aquarium) or
Lears Weinzapfel (Dewey Square's MBTA operation center). Yet the
market for PoMo survives here, I'm told, as it does nowhere else
but Kuwait City. With that possible exception -- and Las Vegas, of
course -- I wonder whether upper Huntington Avenue is rapidly
turning into the nation's capital of architectural schlock.
Yes, the developers (in the case of Trinity Place and 111
Huntington Avenue the Raymond Property Company and media mogul
Mortimer Zuckerman's Boston Properties, respectively) deserve
their share of the blame. Ditto Boston's design review board.
But whatever was the story with Trinity Place and 111 Huntington,
the name each building wears is unequivocally that of CBT/Childs
Bertman Tseckares.
It is an architectural firm that, before it began to do
increasingly problematic large-scale commercial work in the early
1990s, had distinguished itself over the years, especially for
superb adaptive reuse of historic structures. The architects'
credits in the Back Bay alone include the Ames-Webster House; the
former Exeter Street Theater; and Louis, Boston. Even now they are
restoring the long-missed tower to Harvard's Memorial Hall.
CBT has also done some fine new small-scale work, ranging from the
Charles River Park Synagogue to the recent Nike store on Newbury
at Exeter, a handsome building that manages to be sensitive to its
site without cloning any of its neighbors in the usual approved
fashion hereabouts.
Furthermore, one of the principals, Richard Bertman, is among the
nicest men you'd ever want to know. Did I forget to say that his
partner Tseckares is the current president of the Boston Society
of Architects?
You get the picture, I'm sure. But none of it, though it adds to
irony, holds out any hope at all for Copley Square.
The area's so hot now that architectural quality hardly matters, I
guess. Just last week, the ~Boston Business Journal~ reported of
Trinity Place (in a page-one story) that "buyers are already
queuing for units that are being sold for as much as $4 million a
piece. An au pair suite can be thrown in for an extra $400,000."
Although the steel frame is only just now rising, the ~Journal
~reports that "close to 40 percent of the multimillion-dollar
units have been snapped up by buyers."
By way of explanation, a local civic leader volunteered to the
~Journal~ that "there is nothing like having a front lawn that is
Copley Square."
And that, of course, is why it's not a case of so much money for
so little architecture. Trinity Place will be a good deal for its
residents, whose view, after all, will be of Trinity ~Church~.
It's the rest of us I worry about.
~Historian and critic Douglass Shand-Tucci is the author of
several books on American art and architecture and New England
studies.~
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