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Boston, Massachusetts
And we could all together go out on the ocean, me upon my pony on my boat
No more than a ten minute walk from the Convention Center, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro's ICA Boston is still just as spectacular as I remembered. It still features that giant elevator, that fantastic gallery overlooking the harbor, that wondrously brave cantilever, that great set of public, harborside steps and that singularly spectacular media room with the best view of the harbor, although admittedly one that is just a bit cropped.
One of the AIA tours took me inside Stefan Behnisch's groundbreaking Genzyme Center office building in Cambridge near MIT, the first LEED Platinum office building built in the US (LEED is an environmentally friendly standard for green construction, it involves an arbitrary point system and rewards projects for a certain amount of innovation in design and construction- if you are a design professional and thinking of becoming LEED accredited just like me, let me know and I'll send you whatever advice I can for the test). The Genzyme Center has all the LEED bells and whistles, including computer controlled windows that use fresh air to cool the building, heliostats on the roof to redirect natural lights and (of course) waterless urinals. Its central atrium (see below) uses almost every trick imaginable to direct, redirect and redirect again every available bit of natural light into every corner of the building. The result is dizzying at first but ends up rather calming and surprisingly pleasant as you start to get used to it.
More than once and more than twice (ok, three times) strangers came up to our AIA tour of Boston's City Hall to complain to us about how much the building sucked, how it was the worst building possible to work in day after day, echoing a strong sentiment that large groups of the local populace seem to share. The building (designed by competition winners Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles in 1962) is beloved by (some) architects but also, sadly, easy to hate. First of all the building was sited in a horribly open, programmatically void plaza, and the brutalist design features a lot of concrete and is rather inflexible (to say the least). Increased security requirements, a misguided plaza master plan by I.M. Pei and a program of deferred (or rather no) maintenance also haven't helped much. The current mayor has been looking to cut the city's losses and sell the building, either to replace it with something new or have it become something else, even though it doesn't seem to really want to be anything else but what it is- an (at times) beautiful, impractical City Hall in an oversized, virtually abandoned plaza smack dab in the middle of Boston.
The AIA tour of the building took me just about everywhere, from the back entrance to inside the mayor's actual office to all points in between. The building has some strengths amidst all those weaknesses, and even its most ardent supports realize that some modifications are a good idea, even as those very same supporters are doing everything they can to quickly landmark the building before tragedy (and/or a torch carrying mob) has its way with it.
Just a short walk from the brutalist City Hall is another (I think) better brutalist building, Paul Rudolph's very own Government Service Center. Featured recently in "The Departed" (it was where all of the Massachusetts State Police offices were), it has a lot of the inflexibility of City Hall but without the horrible public plaza and all of that unnecessary attention.
One last shot of Maine to end the slideshow, this time looking past high tide, past Bar Island and past the harbor as the daylight slowly slips away, knowing full well that we’ll be back to Boston again but, probably, back here before first.
But wait, there’s more
I go to these AIA Conventions almost every year, meaning that there’s lots of slideshows and pictures and stories from all sorts of different cities, showing off their best architecture and design for all to see.
