Re: Liberty Mutual plans major Boston expansion
I'm going to go out on a limb and say virtually every prewar building is irreplaceable. I would love to see a moratorium on their destruction.
It's short term thinking because it permanently sacrifices some good buildings for what will inevitably be bad ones, because the city isn't even considering other ways it can accommodate the proposal and keep the same jobs, and because it encourages similar blackmailing moves by other Boston companies that either have jobs to offer or jobs to take away if they can't have their way with the city's historic fabric on the cheap. There's a reason Liberty Mutual is doing this now - trust me, their business is not up.
I think this pretty much hits the nail on the head. In fact, a blanket landmarking for every prewar building is one of three legislative changes affecting the built environment that I'd most like to see introduced in Boston (the other two being to have an express policy of phasing out surface parking lots; and to introduce zoning regulations that place an emphasis on restricting width rather than height for developers willing/able to build up).
Please explain, Itchy. This is a new project that brings hundreds of jobs in construction, engineering and design (industries that are tanking right now), keeps a major company headquartered in Boston, brings over a thousand permanent jobs into the city, removes a parking lot, adds to the density, adds to the city's tax revenue...how does this translate to a "net negative for Boston"?
Yes, this would be an economic plus for Boston. It would create economic activity. I would not deny that. But this is an architecture forum, and what I had in mind is the impact of this building on Boston's built environment.
Lots of things can create economic activity without being a positive development for a city's built environment. In the simplest illustration of that, Keynes famously said that the state could create economic growth by paying people to dig holes. A more sophisticated example is the highways that were built through cities (like Boston) or scrapped (like the one through SoHo) in the years after WWII. Closer to the here and now, the postwar period has seen the likes of One Financial Center, the First National Bank Bldg, and One Beacon Street built. All of these things created economic growth (or would have). But none of them was necessarily good for the built environment or, for those of us who find the built environment relevant to it, quality of life.
I agree that it's good that Liberty Mutual will supposedly add jobs and that construction workers will have an extra paycheck. And it's true that we haven't seen renders of the Liberty project.
But I think that the city should finally have some more enlightened building sensibilities. What do I mean by that? Well, the Mayor/BRA tend to have a tight grip on what gets built in this city. But one relic of the urban-redevelopment Fifties/Sixties is that the BRA's portfolio is twofold: to oversee building and to promote economic development. That creates skewed (and vague) criteria for the way the built environment is regulated in Boston.
I'd like to see companies add jobs (and construction workers have work) in Boston. But I think economic development and the built environment need to be separated.
In this instance, I think it's almost cruel that we continue to raze prewar buildings (the likes of which -- let's be honest -- we'll never see again) while so much of Boston is surface lots, or on/off ramps, or the grassy vacuums next to highways, or just generally undeveloped/undense. So, to make Liberty happy, I'd like to see a hypothetical city economic development office help find it space and a developer to partner with. Simultaneously, I'd like to see a hypothetical separate buildings department make sure it doesn't raze perfectly good prewar buildings in a dense, historic part of the city in order to replace them with a chunky, suburban, generic landscraper-in-a-box.
We have a crater where Filene's (Filene's! in Downtown Crossing! the crossroads of the freaking city!) was. We have a huge mass of parking lots in the Seaport that will never be developed apparently because nobody needs to build new offices. We have highways that cleave the city. If you have a company looking to add space, why not even try to help broker a deal between them and a developer active in these areas?
Instead, we'll continue to chip away at the apparently whorishly cheap historical fabric of the city (at least it's cheap if you're Druker, Hynes, or some other friend of Boss Menino with plans to build a crappy-looking box). We'll repeat the mistakes of building highways, building One Financial Center and probably even just digging holes (my money says we can an "art installment" like that on the Greenway at some point) because the built environment is closely tied to politics here, and our politicians are bankrupt. Every time I look at One Financial Center or the Mass Pike, I see wrongs that need to be righted. I think about how much money some spectacularly rich individual who cares about Boston's built environment will have to waste to fix those mistakes and give us a beautiful skyline, or an engaging street-level atmosphere, or sew together separated swaths of the city.
It's mere aesthetics, you might say. Yes, jobs are important, but I would argue that aesthetics are important too. And from Caesar Augustus to the Habsburg Emperors to the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, there was a time when plenty of fairly pragmatic-minded people would have agreed with that. Even today, a place like London agrees with that and legislates accordingly. As the global financial capital, I don't think it's hurting too badly as a result.
