Landmark decision
Not all notable Boston buildings should be preserved
By Paul McMorrow
July 30, 2010
THE BOSTON Landmarks Commission will soon grant landmarks status to the Christian Science Center. That outcome is all but assured. What follows looks far less certain, and in that uncertainty, lurks trouble.
This current round of landmarking is a relatively quiet affair. The Christian Science Center complex is a beloved public gathering space. Architects admire the space for its detailing and for the way its geometry harmonizes with the historic neighborhoods around it.
Not all projects of the 1960s were designed as well, though. Several of the concrete-heavy modernist structures in Boston?s urban core choke off street-level vitality, sever neighborhood connections, and impede rational patterns of real estate development. They?re not just ugly; they?re also anti-urban.
The super-blocks of the Government Center urban renewal area, which stretch from the Financial District into the old West End, are particularly egregious culprits. That?s why they?ve been repeatedly targeted for redevelopment. In a normal economy, the Government Center Garage, City Hall Plaza, the District A-1 police station, the low-rise portion of the JFK Federal Building, and the state-owned Lindemann-Hurley complex could all be plowed under.
Then there?s City Hall, which Mayor Thomas Menino targeted for sale and demolition in late 2006, touching off debate about the place of 1960s-era modernism in the modern era.
What?s happening at the Christian Science Center has direct bearing on the future of all those other modern, brutalist monuments to the old New Boston.
The Christian Science Center complex will be the first urban renewal-era development in Boston to achieve landmarks designation, a powerful preservation tool that affords select buildings high levels of historic protection. But in the 118-page Landmarks Commission report that recommends preserving the complex, there?s no concise explanation of exactly why the Christian Science Center deserves protection.
In the absence of such an explanation, a debate is already bubbling up about what the landmarking designation really means. Is it an isolated bid to protect a beloved public space from over-development? Or does it confer new legitimacy to a vast collection of urban renewal-era monoliths, and set the table for an aggressive campaign to protect the rotten concrete core that architects I.M. Pei and Paul Rudolph and urban planner Ed Logue created five decades ago?
?The worst thing would be for us to learn the wrong lessons from landmarking the Christian Science Center,?? said George Thrush, director of Northeastern University?s school of architecture. ?I do not think we?re saying all Paul Rudolph buildings, all I.M. Pei buildings, all steel-reinforced concrete buildings built in the 1960s, deserve to be preserved as a keeper of the flame of that era. Are we going to make permanent the errors we made in the ?60s???
Ellen Lipsey, executive director of the Landmarks Commission, has insisted there?s no relation between what Landmarks is doing with the Christian Science Center, and what it may or may not do with that development?s contemporaries around Government Center. But Landmarks Commission documents suggest there?s some serious institutional inertia drifting in the direction of preserving the redevelopment parcels around Government Center.
A year ago, the Landmarks Commission updated a decades-old survey of central business district buildings constructed in the 20th century. The report recommended protecting City Hall, the Lindemann-Hurley complex, and the Government Center urban renewal district as a whole. It also recommended placing several buildings potentially in developers? sights ? from the Government Center T stop to the A-1 police station, the JFK Building, and the Government Center Garage ? on the National Register of Historic Places.
From an urban standpoint, that would be a catastrophe. The danger comes in wanting to collect the works of urban renewal-era architects like designer-label handbags, while ignoring the consequences of blind preservation.
Rudolph?s impossibly huge Lindemann-Hurley complex severed an important connection between Beacon Hill, the West End, and Haymarket. Today, it also stands between the State House and the Greenway. The Government Center Garage is a monstrosity that should come down as quickly as possible, and A-1, which lies next door, is in the footprint of the new buildings that would replace the garage. It isn?t nearly significant enough to warrant sacrificing the garage redevelopment for. And if the JFK Building proves anything, it?s that Walter Gropius, father of the Bauhaus movement, could design terrible, oversized floor plates like any other mercenary; if the feds really do want to vacate Gropius?s low-rise and put it out to bid, we should welcome that impulse, not fight it.
Paul McMorrow is a staff writer at Banker and Tradesman. His column appears regularly in the Globe.
