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Boston, Massachusetts
Asleep in perfect blue buildings beside the green apple sea
We’re a few years into the “exotic hockey” (ok, I can come up with a better name) weekend trips that I take my father on every year, and this year we’re taking an Acela north out of New York and all the way up to Boston.
Fifty stories above the river from Boston’s Prudential Center, on a chilly late Saturday afternoon, the damn shiny John Hancock Tower does its best to block any good view of downtown.
Boston (well, actually Cambridge) isn't being left out and now has its own totally original (well, actually vaguely familiar) Frank Gehry building, obviously (or, actually, maybe not obviously) still under construction.
Perhaps the coolest college dormitory building ever, Simmons Hall at M.I.T. looms over Vassar Street and itself, proving that sometimes grids are fun too. Designed by New York architect Steven Holl, its cantilevers almost look unreal when you get just a little too close.
I have a history of being infatuated by shiny, new buildings, of making wholesale proclamations that just don't hold up, of being too easily impressed by new things. With such a history stalking my every move I present four additional pictures of Steven Holl's Simmons Hall, my new favorite building (at least from the outside). How anyone could not fall for such a fun, photogenic,building with all those cool colors and tiny little windows remains a true mystery to me.
The back of Trinity Church and all the buildings that make Copley Square famous with the Square itself nowhere in sight.
Continuing the "new and old" theme of that last picture but taking it to a fresh, new "old and older" level, where downtown neighborhoods especially popular with tourists still like to demonstrate the almost dehumanizing differences in urban scale that people have been slowly forced to endure over the last 250 years.
The Big Dig is underway in Boston, where (in a progressive but expensive move) they’re burying a highway and (eventually) demolishing the elevated one that separates downtown. That suspension bridge is part of it, while the boring building on the left is the reason we came all this way this time.
Inside the Fleet Center, where the hometown Bruins beat the Washington Capitals 5-4 in a thrilling overtime game. As for the Fleet Center, it’s…ok. I sort of expected more I guess.
