visible city

I'm almost finished with Shand-Tucci's Built in Boston. This blog contains at least four entries that refer to him and I can't apologize for that. I feel slightly more knowledgeable about the history of the architecture in the city, but I'm frustrated that he doesn't spend more time discussing the demographic trends and technical innovations that had such a profound impact on its development. Some of these elements, like cars, steel and elevators, are taken for granted. Others, like air conditioning and fluorescent lighting, are hardly mentioned in any history text (unless you read Rayner Banham).

Oh, and this is a picture of New York, which is all I had in my archive. I'll get some shots of Boston up eventually--hopefully obscure ones. I just needed an urban context for this post.

Shand-Tucci does a good job of framing the modernist revolution, and the backlash against it, by pointing to the specific architects and buildings that define each "period." Heroic modernism, of course, is City Hall and the General Services Building by Paul Rudolph. He marks the turning point into post-modernism with Johnson's addition to the Public Library. He is an unapologetic defender of the merits of each generation of architects and the styles that were used, but he has a hard sell when discussing the modern period from the 60's to the late 70's. At some point in time, I intend to mount a pointless and strident attack on Boston City Hall and City Hall Plaza and I want to make sure that it addresses the reasons for Shand-Tucci's admiration. These are, it seems, their heroic gesture, their contextualism(!), and their other-than-human space-making strategies. Some of this prose refers to Pei's Christian Science Plaza, but the spirit is similar.

I'm trying to identify the point in time when major parts of Boston reached a scale and character that "locked it down" so to speak. The Back Bay seemed settled in by the late 1800's, Downtown around the same time, The Financial District by the late 1980's. I base this on the volume of building types and their influence. The modern period actually seemed to impact less of the city proper than any major development surge of the 1900's. The city was so settled and built-up that the big disasters of modernism--The West End and Government Center--actually don't take up a lot of land area. The greater impact was from the elevated portion of Interstate 93, and more importantly, the commercial expansion in the Route 128 corridor. But, neither of those generated much of what we call architecture.

Must talk about Interstate Highway system soon.