...a bookstore has been the only place the general public was likely to benefit from their presence among us.
Don Saklad
[http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/99/02/25/SKYLINE.html]
[[[sidebar]]] *_The Boston Phoenix_*
*February 25 - March 4, 1999*
[Features]
ALLSTON . . . AND BEYOND
THE INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED MACHADO AND SILVETTI FINALLY SCORE THEIR
LOCAL MARK
~Skyline~ by Douglass Shand-Tucci
A great event is about to enliven Boston -- in Allston, a part of
town that is rarely given the sort of attention usually reserved,
say, for the Back Bay or the new Seaport District. Nor is the
great event either skyscraper or courthouse, or any sort of center
-- centennial, millennial, or whatever.
We are talking bragging rights to the new Allston Branch Library,
for which there are plans to break ground in late summer; a
building most eagerly awaited, not only because Allston has needed
such a library for many years, but because it will be an
architectural milestone.
Aside from one superb but well-hidden house in suburban Concord
and a few exquisite but largely inaccessible remodelings in the
Back Bay and Cambridge, the Allston Library will be the first work
in Greater Boston by Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, whom just
a month ago I called Boston's hottest architects.
As architectural theorists whose work daringly pushes the edge of
current thought and practice, these men have long enjoyed
worldwide repute. Their design projects have been published in
architectural books and journals here and in Europe and exhibited
in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the
Venice and Paris Biennales.
As teachers, both men are also distinguished. Each is now a
tenured professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and each
has headed a leading school of architecture -- Machado at the
Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, and Silvetti at
Harvard, where he is currently chair of the department of
architecture.
Their built work has come more slowly. It is not entirely because
of Boston's well-known conservatism in matters architectural that
so great an honor as Machado and Silvetti's first local public
work is only now about to grace Allston. There is not a lot of
Machado and Silvetti's architecture anywhere, although they have
in recent years done notable buildings at Princeton, where they
are the authors of the university's overall master plan.
In fact, they have been highly selective over the years -- too
much so, perhaps -- and both partners typically hold design
control (particularly in its early, conceptual stage) very
closely. They also strive for much: in their own words, for
"conceptual clarity and visual intensity"; in the words of an
admiring colleague and disciple, for nothing less than "a new
relationship between history and invention."
Furthermore, they attempt all this in a diverse range of stylistic
languages. Asked about influences, for example, one will speak of
Andrea Palladio, the other of Aldo Rossi, and both of Le
Corbusier's residential work.
Their design, though, is always unmistakably Machado and Silvetti,
and the fact that their projects have won award after award over
the years -- both in this country and abroad -- surely signaled
that it was only a matter of time before they achieved a
breakthrough in their built work.
That happened when they won the prestigious competition to design
the $100 million center of antiquities for the Getty Villa and
Museum at Malibu, in Los Angeles, a commission that catapulted
them into the league of international "star" architects that
includes Renzo Piano, Raphael Moneo, and Frank Gehry.
For the cognoscenti, of course, they had already arrived in that
company with their built work at Princeton. I remember my delight,
for example, while reading Diane Ghirardo's ~Architecture After
Modernism~ in 1996, to find in the last chapter that Machado and
Silvetti's work was considered along with that of Piano and Gehry,
Tadao Ando and Norman Foster. Theirs was the only Boston practice
dealt with in that company, and their elegant parking garage (of
all things) at Princeton was the final illustration in Ghirardo's
book.
Although they are at work on a number of projects in Boston,
including the Cyclorama complex in the South End, a bookstore has
been the only place the general public was likely to benefit from
their presence among us. Until the Allston Library.
The result of wide-ranging consultations with both librarians and
local residents, the new library's design derives fundamentally
from a number of functional necessities that the architects have
skillfully turned to their advantage in their determination to
design a beautiful as well as a practical building.
Believe it or not, among the most difficult problems for
librarians everywhere is security. Machado and Silvetti have met
this challenge quite elegantly. For example: they avoid large
exterior areas of plate glass, and they accommodate the need
within the library for maximum visual control of the space. That,
as well as the community's need to use the building for meetings
when the library is closed, surely inspired the plan of the
structure. Its two wings, one with reading rooms and the other
with meeting rooms, are conspicuously separate and usable quite
independently. Each wing, moreover, flanks and surrounds a series
of interior garden courts that are open to the sky. Their windowed
walls (vandal-proof because of their interior location) light the
reading rooms generously, as well as offering charming garden
views to those within.
Tim Love, the project architect, under partner-in-charge Silvetti,
calls them "reading gardens," and in one of them they have
carefully preserved a rare European copper beech tree to give both
beauty and shade.
It is the sort of design these architects are increasingly famous
for, the sort that moved ~Los Angeles Times ~architecture critic
Nicolai Ouroussoff to exclaim that "Machado and Silvetti
. . . offer exquisite materials, elegant detailing, a delicate
sense of history. The secret is that they are also sensitive urban
planners . . . They see, rightly, that cities are made up of
fragments of distorted, incomplete visions, and their design seeks
to reflect that urban complexity."
The Allston streetscape exactly -- the complexity of which,
ranging from 1920s three-deckers to post-World War II "Colonials,"
the design of this new library picks up and integrates with a fine
bravura. The fact that Machado and Silvetti are able to pull this
off testifies to the fact that they are very cosmopolitan
designers.
Argentine-born, they were educated there, in Europe, and here,
where they have become citizens. It is not every architect who
would sing so lyrical a song in Allston, or be brave enough to
endow so serious a work as a library with a butterfly roof.
Libraries may be serious, but they need not be dull or stuffy --
or red-brick-boring, either. Think again. And think of the next
generation this library needs to attract.
And this is where these exceptionally cosmopolitan architects
prove themselves so Bostonian -- indeed, so Emersonian. For the
Boston Public Library, not content with the glories of its Copley
Square landmark building, has for many years followed a rare and
splendid tradition of gifting some of the most neglected city
neighborhoods with branch libraries of outstanding distinction.
Some examples: the Parker Hill Branch Library of 1931, in Roxbury,
was designed in a modified Gothic style by no less than Ralph
Adams Cram, the Boston architect then of the widest international
repute; the North End branch of 1965 is by Carl Koch, an important
early modernist designer; the Charlestown branch, erected in 1970,
is a notable work of striking cantilevered design by Eduardo
Catalano, whose best-known Boston-area building is the MIT Student
Center.
To this illustrious roll we can now add Machado and Silvetti.
What I like most about their work is that although their ideas are
always well thought out and usually quite stimulating
intellectually, the form those ideas take invariably catches my
eye first. I am seduced, so to speak, before I am convinced -- and
always by form that is very strong, so strong it easily
encompasses a spare but deeply ingrained elegance, an elegance I
experience with all the pleasure of a secret somehow discovered,
against all odds, where least expected.
Consider the slate work on the façade at Allston, for
example. It is roughly, crisply chiseled on the ground floor;
above, however, the pattern of slates, used like shingles, is flat
and planar. The effect in each case is bold, yet the palette could
not be more subtle: the slates' variation of color is
exquisite. Some will see the blues. Some will see the grays. Some
will see the silvery green I like most of all.
Greater Boston has surely waited too long for its first public
building by Machado and Silvetti. And Allston is very lucky.
------------------------------------------------------------------
The Allston Library may be a harbinger of things to come. Though
we are surely right to be fixating on the new Seaport District and
the great opportunities that are hardly being taken advantage of
there, we would do well to recall that Boston has more than one
waterfront site where we are entitled to hope for something worthy
and wonderful.
Consider the Charles River, on either side of which, in both
Allston and Cambridge, there is already much good architecture to
see along the banks.
On the Cambridge side stand not only Alvar Aalto's Baker House at
MIT -- the Boston area's greatest modernist building of the second
half of the 20th century -- but, further up, opposite Allston, the
early-20th-century masterwork of Charles Coolidge: the Harvard
Houses, perhaps the best Georgian-revival collegiate buildings in
America. On the same bank is also Ralph Adams Cram's
medieval-revival masterpiece of the mid-1930s, the Cowley Fathers
Monastery.
On the Allston side, Harvard Business School is admittedly nowhere
near as good as the houses on the opposite bank: the business
school looks pinched in comparison. Cram used to joke that driving
between them was a case of Theodore Roosevelt in Cambridge and
Calvin Coolidge in Allston.
The business school has done better in our era, however.
Yes, there is that glitzy and vulgar chapel by Moshe Safdie, which
would just be ludicrous if it weren't such an offensive parody of
another glorious modernist landmark, Eero Saarinen's MIT
Chapel. But there is also the truly outstanding work at the
B-school of Kallmann, McKinnell, and Wood, whose legacy of superb
architecture over the past 40-odd years in Boston includes Shad
Hall, the business school's gym. It is a fine example of how the
modernist aesthetic can compass the neo-Georgian and even enhance
it.
Unifying both sides of the river, notably at Harvard and Boston
Universities, are the striking academic towers of one of Boston's
modernist masters, Jose-Luis Sert.
To all this, it is now likely we'll be able to add Renzo
Piano. He, it is greatly to be hoped, will be given the
opportunity of designing Harvard's proposed new Museum of Modern
Art alongside the Western Avenue Bridge, Boston's need for which
is so clear.
This is the context in which the Allston Library may be a very
good omen. And only the beginning.
As my mind plays over the stream of architecture I've described
here, I find myself hoping that Allston will hold even greater
opportunities for Machado and Silvetti.
~Historian and critic Douglass Shand-Tucci is the author of
several books on American art and architecture and New England
studies. His column appears biweekly in the ~Phoenix~.~
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