The secret city

Part 4

by Tom Scocca

Even as Shand-Tucci's scholarship heads for the frontiers of cultural theory, he remains focused on Boston. His next project is a biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, The Art of Scandal, which is due out in November. It is, by his account, another case of reconciling the old with the new, featuring a dramatic reinterpretation of the Gardner Museum.

Gardner, he argues, should be counted as America's first female architect; the home (now museum) she designed for herself, which is usually dismissed as conventional, he sees as a pioneering piece of work. "What's interesting about it," he says, "is that she had this inspired idea of turning a Venetian-style palazzo outside-in.

"In reality, it's a very modernistic ensemble," he elaborates. "It's an architecture of fragments, lots of parts of old buildings that she brought over from Europe." What Gardner did, he says (turning the syllogism down the home stretch), is "put them together in a really brilliant, eclectic collage -- and what is collage but a very modernist design system, for which Picasso was noted at about the same time?"

Finding new relationships between modern ideas and the buildings of the past offers more than a chance to improve old structures' reputations. It presents an opportunity to discover new vigor in apparently fading approaches. Pure modern architecture, Shand-Tucci says, "seems to have come to some kind of end, in some ways. It seems unsatisfying to lot of people."

But though people may want to turn away from modernism, traditional architecture is, if anything, even further out of the question: "There's nobody in Boston who could design a Gothic church -- a good one," he declares. "Nobody." There is, however, one in New York, he allows: a man named Gerald Allen. Allen and Shand-Tucci will be speaking at a conference this fall at the University of Richmond, a school that has stuck with Gothic Revival architecture through the whole of the modern period ("Probably a mistake," Shand-Tucci says, "because you didn't get the most creative architects 25 years ago doing Gothic Revival stuff. . . . I haven't seen it, so I don't know").

The purpose of the lectures, Shand-Tucci says, will be to explore the question of "whether it's possible to do traditional architecture again today, in any way." He's not sure it is, he says, "but I'm interested in the fact that the next generation seems to want to go back to doing some of it, and is looking to my generation for a little justification."

Just so long as they're not looking to hang on to the past indiscriminately -- say, to buttress a late-night lunch counter against the onslaught of progress. Some differences, it seems, are irreconcilable. "The whole preservation thing -- it's right, it's human, it's good, we all want to save what is meaningful and significant and noble," Shand-Tucci says, "but it's also pathetic, and futile, and ludicrous in another way."

An example is what he sees as "guilt over what's happened to Harvard Square." There are limits, he says, to what's worth fighting for. "I think the center of [Harvard Square] doesn't matter anymore," Shand-Tucci says. In its relentless self-reinvention, he says, it has become indistinguishable from "what I see when I go to Houston."

What matters now, he says, is the square's periphery: the curving sidewalk by Brattle Street, where street performers and pedestrians congregate; the narrow street along the front of Lowell House, which runs through trees and a picturesque array of buildings. He recounts the landmarks, the vistas that unfold there, each item discrete, yet collectively harmonious. "Nobody designs such things," Shand-Tucci marvels. "Nobody could."

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