Splendor denied, continued

by Douglass Shand-Tucci

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HARVARD'S NEO-GEORGIAN SPIRES define one side of the Charles, while Boston University's Modernist tower stakes a handsome claim to the other. Why are so many afraid to make a bold statement on the Allston shores?

One question (given how easily and successfully Boston University, though much newer than Harvard, has established its presence on the river) is why Allston should feel so apparently ill at ease with its Charles River front door. Like all New Englanders, Allstonians may use their back door much more, but the Charles is as much theirs as Cambridge's, surely.

The most fundamental question, however, is why Allston, or Cambridge either, should think its rights so absolutely paramount in the first place. The mind boggles at such parochialism, even in the land of the New England town meeting, "Every [Harvard] tub on its own bottom," and the People's Republic of Cambridge.

Of course, the citizens of Allston have rights here. Cantabrigians, too. But so do I as a resident of the Back Bay, and I had the same rights when I lived in Dorchester. (Never mind that I'm also a Harvard graduate.) We all have rights. Above all, the community we all share with a few million others -- Boston as a whole -- has rights.

Greater Boston is the sixth-largest metropolis in the nation. The Charles is ours, as much as the Seine belongs to Paris. And if it's less exciting to look at our architecture, that may be another clue that Paris is less parochial than Boston.

Allston should have a vote. Cambridge, too. But a veto? Absolutely not. Especially because the site of the proposed dormitory is right next to Harvard's business school -- which, by the way, has been a leading citizen of Allston, not Cambridge, for the better part of a century now. The tower's site, furthermore, is blocks and blocks from the nearest house. The only neighborhood this tower will affect immediately is Harvard Business School.

So what is Allston's role in all this? You may well ask. Architecture critic, I guess. Yet I've got to say, I don't go to Allston for that. And there's something very wrong that Mayor Menino should.

I'm sorry. For Menino to write to Harvard's president protesting the work of some of the country's leading architects, on the advice of neighborhood activists who charge that work (highly admired here and in Europe by the most thoughtful critics) with having yielded a "monstrosity" for Allston -- all this indicates a deeply dysfunctional decision-making process at City Hall, and a very odd set of values.

There is something, in Boston as elsewhere, called the design community. And, on matters such as this, the mayor ought to have more recourse to that community. Especially several weeks after launching -- sincerely, one hoped -- his agenda for the arts.

It really is true that the arts draw more people to Boston even than sports, and are of vital economic (never mind spiritual) importance to the region. Yet in so cavalierly dismissing the work of internationally distinguished Boston designers, Menino is giving the lie to his arts agenda and sending exactly the wrong message to the design community everywhere.

Another aspect of this sorry state of affairs is the role I suspect Harvard Business School of playing in the matter.

Now, if I don't seek architectural criticism from the Allston community, neither do I seek it from the business school. We all, doubtless, owe much to the "West Point of Capitalism," but although the original Georgian Revival B-school complex is quite handsome, aesthetics have never been the school's forte.

The taste level most conspicuous in American business is, after all, relentlessly conventional (you find the mall by listening for the waterfall), overblown (trophy houses with kitchens that could fly the Concorde), and totally faux (reproduction Shingle Style or Arts and Crafts country houses -- the better to hide the bottom-line mentality, you understand, while showing off the paycheck . . . excuse me, stock options).

Harvard Business School is not by any means immune to such breezes from corporate America. And, not surprisingly, rumor has it that the B-school is not enthusiastic about Machado and Silvetti's tower. The plan was likely initiated by Harvard's central administration, which has, to put it mildly, rather more sophisticated tastes. Still, the business school has proved open to the design's virtues of late. Not so Cambridge's old guard -- one eye cocked toward neighboring Allston, it doesn't like this project at all.

Surprised? The truth is that Brattle Street's values, which can be quite liberal politically, are aesthetically very conservative -- almost philistine.

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Douglass Shand-Tucci is a historian and critic of American art and architecture and a scholar of New England studies. He is the author of Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-2000 (forthcoming from University of Massachusetts Press).