The secret city

Part 2

by Tom Scocca

Since graduating from Harvard with the Class of '72 ("not a learned class," he recalls), Shand-Tucci has been a self-taught scholar. "I didn't then and I don't now care for the art-historical establishment," he says. "All the buildings that I was interested in, they thought were junk."

The problem, he explains, was that historically inspired building styles, so common in New England, were utterly out of vogue among forward-thinking critics. He cites as an example Harvard's Lowell House, a tall-spired, red-brick Georgian Revival edifice that he considers "perfectly proportioned, brilliantly balanced." Buildings like Lowell, "which now you probably respect and think of as fairly traditional slash establishment slash dull, were really thought of as trash," he says. "The alumni might get weepy about it, but modernism preached the absolute immorality of traditional architecture after Louis Sullivan, say -- after about 1880."

This worship of stylistic purity led to certain paradoxes. In the 1930s, for example, the firm of Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott built a number of the old-fashioned Harvard houses -- including Lowell -- at roughly the same time the firm was creating the more modern Northeastern campus. "And I grew up being told Northeastern was honest, honorable, fine, and a masterwork," Shand-Tucci says, "and Lowell House was a pastiche and a piece of shit.

"The thing I most remember about those days was that all the books that I read about architecture, especially in Boston and New England, were devoid of a great many buildings that I thought were really great. I can show you histories of American architecture in which none of the people whose work I cared for even appeared."

So in the end -- "full of crusading whatever-it-is," he says -- he wrote his own architecture book, Built in Boston. But Built in Boston does more than just champion his favorite neglected architects. In what Shand-Tucci calls the "populist side" of the book, it includes chapters on particular common building forms: movie palaces, three-decker apartments, middle-class suburban homes.

In the late '70s, he says, people were taken aback by that sort of work. "When I first wrote about three-deckers, people looked at me like I was absolutely out of my mind. Three-deckers? Cheap, slum, tenement housing. Why would anyone be interested in three-deckers?"

But today, he points out, thanks to the efforts of his generation of historians, the establishment has embraced vernacular architecture. "I have now played my part in the last 20 years in redressing the balance," he says. "It's no longer an issue. Now, for heaven's sakes, people write learned theses about diners and stuff."

Part 3

Tom Scocca can be reached at tscocca[a]phx.com.