Splendor denied, continued

by Douglass Shand-Tucci

Skyscrapers -- even of only 21 stories and even along a spacious riverfront where elsewhere (at BU, for instance, or at 1010 Memorial Drive) they have shown how well suited such a riverfront "high spine" is to cities -- do not go down well on Brattle Street. Neither, by the way, does the city, which Brattle Street is determined to suburbanize at any cost. Architecture, for the powers that be here, ideally consists of endless Colonial theme parks; throw in Victorian for variety. I can't help recalling the tourist on the Potomac boat who, on seeing Mt. Vernon, exclaimed: "Why, Mother, such a beautiful Howard Johnson's!"

It is easy to poke fun. But does anyone, I wonder, remember how close Brattle Street's cousins, the protectors of the Back Bay (whose Back Bay, by the way?), came to denying us the Hancock Tower? That single most beautiful object on Boston's skyline today was really saved only by the architectural historian and pioneering preservationist Walter Muir Whitehill -- who, as leaders should, took a broader view than most.

Also, John Hancock could teach any pol a thing or two about power. The company, it is widely assumed, just threatened to pull up stakes and leave town. Harvard can't very well do that. And that's another problem.

Ever notice how really undignified, not to say pathetic, it is how local pols love to harass Harvard? Never mind that it's rich. It's a chance to play in the big leagues. But do I detect something more, something deeper here -- a certain disposition to resent our cultural crown jewel?

Nearly 400 years of town-and-gown can get on your nerves, of course, and Harvard, like any large institution, always needs watching. And sometimes it needs to be quarreled with, as I and many others tried to recently over the remodeling of the Harvard Union's Great Hall.

But on the riverfront the community's record is bleak. Where was Brattle Street, or Allston, or the business school, when the Genzyme building was first mooted for this area? Nowhere in sight, I'll warrant. Or if they were, they weren't very effective. Which is why we now have this childishly simple-minded attempt to turn a biotech factory into a cathedral -- in red brick, no less -- as a permanent eyesore on the banks of the Charles. Embarrassing by daylight, it's positively scary by night. No one raised a murmur. Even worse, because more pretentious -- and I recall no objection to its erection except mine -- is the B-school's own McArthur Center, farther up the river at Charlesbank, Harvard's most idyllic point.

As an example of schlock architecture, the McArthur Center is going to be hard to beat. And because it is obscenely out of scale, it is impossible to miss.

Brattle Street certainly, Allston probably, and I suspect the business school too, turned the other cheek willingly enough, I surmise, because the McArthur Center, though gross in detail and gargantuan in mass, is not only red brick, but red brick with pointy roofs and party hats -- indeed, a whole parade of historical motifs. Even this sort of thing can be done well by a gifted designer -- Robert A. M. Stern, for instance -- but in most hands this kind of pastiche is fatal. The only effect of such "traditional" work at the B-school is to dumb down all the fine old Georgian Revival around it.

Never mind. It's unthreatening, you understand. Like the TV hidden in the Colonial keeping cupboard.

Machado and Silvetti's dormitory, of course, is quite different. To be sure, its courtyard responds graciously to the Georgian quads facing it. Similarly, its tower defers to important historical architecture opposite.

But in the tower's case the response is to Peabody Terrace. That runs up a red flag for preservationists and such, who like to think American architecture ended around 1930. That Peabody Terrace, the work of José Luis Sert, is as much a Modernist masterpiece as the old quads are Georgian Revival masterpieces is a view many histories of American architecture would support. But these are not books found on Allston bookshelves, or the business school's, nor on Brattle Street coffee tables either.

Instead, Brattle Street, like Allston, like the business school -- at least insofar as the powers that be are concerned -- likes pretty architecture. What I call party architecture, all dressed up with this or that historical motif (preferably Colonial) and going somewhere nice. Like Beacon Hill. Red brick. Bulfinch Village.

Machado and Silvetti's tower is not going to any costume party, thank you. No battlefield re-enactments here. It's the architecture of the 21st century. The design does not flout tradition by any means -- there is, after all, a large red-brick courtyard. But neither does it mimic tradition in the way that, as the poet Robert Lowell noticed, New Englanders are only too apt to do; Lowell complained that the old Colonial houses were beginning to look like Treadway Inns, which were of course the reproductions of those days.

Machado and Silvetti's design, by contrast, is contextural -- but Modernist contextural, the best vision I know of for architecture today. Indeed, its bold profile is also a response to the junk architecture nearby, which the eye would not go to so quickly with this splendid tower to focus on. Their design concept is totally masterful. Brilliantly, they throw the upper floors across the full width of the open end of their great court, which remains a gallant response to those other courts opposite but, by that one stroke, becomes something new in courtyards -- if you will, something wonderful.

Notice, too, the way the brick of the courtyard turns the corner, bleeding into the tower. Amid so svelte and majestic a design as these form-makers have given us here, such wit and flair is more than a bonus. Machado and Silvetti, I sometimes think, make their own style. So in his way did Bulfinch, for which we must all give equal thanks. But what M&S do not descend to is Bulfinch pastiche.

Yet what a trivialization of our history it is for anyone to expect that they should. Red brick and white trim, Bulfinch forever and forever, amen. Really! It's not even as if that were Boston's only, or its best, historic face.

Go look at the famous Sears Mansion (the Somerset Club today), on Beacon Street. It's not going to any costume parties either. Serious and severe in form, massive and spare in feeling, it's a splendid old Boston building.

In fact, Boston's best architecture, deservedly world famous (and actually called the Boston Granite Style), is even more severe in some ways. Some day, walk around the harbor: those magnificent granite warehouses stand, if anything does, for all that is noblest and truest in the Boston tradition of architecture. Quincy Market and its flanking markets are more-refined examples. And buried in a courtyard at the Massachusetts General Hospital is the best of all, the Bulfinch Pavilion itself -- sheer granite, very severe, but graceful too. Even lyrical. Very Boston. And by the man himself.

That is the Boston tradition in which Machado and Silvetti's dormitory would stand. And it will be a tragedy for Boston if it is not built.

The first of two, perhaps. For already there are rumors of protests about Harvard's other new project, on the Cambridge side: the new art museum, now being designed by the famous Italian architect Renzo Piano.

When, I wonder, will the other shoe drop? Do these things have to happen?

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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).