ArchiTalk

Hancock's haunt

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:55:52 +0000

When I was a Ghost City Tours tour guide, I'd point out Boston's sole surviving ghost of John Hancock, a little-known landmark sequestered in the shadows of the city's oldest street pattern, the Blackstone Block, as the sole remnant of that pattern's period in history. The Ebenezer Hancock House, which John built in 1767 as the home and office of his younger brother, Deputy Paymaster-General of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, has an angular shape unusual for its time, being built within the confines of the skew lanes and cowpaths that defined it. Since it changed hands last month and has an iffy future, perhaps it's time to revisit its architecture, history and backstory.

What makes us stop and stare at it the most is that it thinks outside the box, having no right-angled corners – as well as a cropped corner, which John may have arranged to bring his brother more sunlight or to allow freer passage of cows and horses there. Its iron S-ties secured its structure at another corner, and the stringcourses in its Flemish-bond brickwork defined its floors. Its larger first-floor windows likely illuminated Ebenezer's disbursements of payments to troops during the Revolutionary War. But despite its less-than-erudite form (compared to brother John's manor, which I'll go into later), it can proudly boast that George Washington Slept Here when it was an inn later on, as well as Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette.

In 1778, the house stored a loan of 2 million French silver crowns from Louis XIV of France, negotiated by Benjamin Franklin as Minister to France and brought into Boston by Admiral Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, as back payment to Washington's Eastern Continental Army. In 1798, Benjamin Fuller opened America's longest continually operating shoestore on the first floor.

William H. Learnard took over Fuller's shoestore in 1821, and ran it until 1886, but it miraculously remained in the building as a shoestore until 1963, as other enterprises in the house and the Blackstone Block came and went over the years, including the Marshall House restaurant, inn and tavern, which operated mainly in the 1890s and the 1910s.

By the early 1970s, the East India Trading Co. antique and souvenir shop was operating in that space. Over the years the house fell into disrepair, even though most of the original interior details remained amazingly intact, probably due to underutilization. I remember walking past it with my father around that time and noticing that its storefront was smashed; my father suspected a break-in. Later the house was "left vacant following a serious car accident in the 1970s, which nearly destroyed the storefront at the corner of the building,” wrote city archaeologist Joseph M. Bagley in Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them. Swartz & Swartz came to the rescue, acquiring it as their law office in 1974 and restoring it to its colonial condition, preserving as much interior detail as possible.

And look at what they did...

Of course, their intricate preservation of all those rooms in their original dimensions, materials and structural elements, from hand-hewn beams to brick walls to wrought-iron cauldrons and andirons, entailed considerable sacrifice of valuable space to conduct legal business. So Swartz & Swartz built an addition on the back in the parking area, careful to hide it from the view of Freedom Trail tourists and to distinguish its modern architectural style from the original.

Incidentally, that parking area once contained a row of houses John Hancock had built on spec to abut Ebenezer's digs. Sadly, they did not survive past the 1950s, leaving the Ebenezer Hancock House as a "holdout" from Boston's Colonial-Revolutionary era:

Hancock Manor (1737-1863), Boston. Photo c.1859.

Engraving of Hancock Manor, Alexander Jackson Davis & Thomas Illman, 1832.

They don't compare in social standing, do they? More than a holdout, the Ebenezer Hancock House is the sole surviving building in Boston associated with its favorite son, due to not only the razing of his spec rowhouses but also the leveling of his own manor, which stood on Beacon Hill on Beacon Street by the site of the Massachusetts State House from 1737 to 1863.

View of Hancock Manor from the Boston Common by Christian Remick, 1768.

Built by Joshua Blanchard for John's merchant uncle Thomas Hancock and later willed to John, this brown Braintree granite and Connecticut sandstone manse was bedecked with corner quoins, a gambrel roof balustrade, and a Juliet balcony from a French window capped with baroque volutes, and it commanded a peerless view of the Boston Common's pastureland.

A view of Hancock Manor and the Boston Neck, Richard Williams, 1775.

As these drawings show, Hancock Manor had the advantage of being built on many acres of rural virgin land. This afforded it a full pasture and garden and a breathtaking view of the Boston Common that extended into the Boston Neck, which attached the town to the mainland by a narrow isthmus at the time, making John Hancock feel like master of all he surveyed. By contrast, the Ebenezer Hancock House had the disadvantage of having to conform to densely settled, firmly established urban street patterns, which hemmed it in considerably.

Hancock Manor staircase. Wood engraving from Ballou’s Pictorial
Drawing-Room Companion, March 26, 1859. Courtesy Bostonian Society.

Hancock Manor's lavish interior began with a paneled parlor with a bridal stair of carved twisted balusters leading up to a landing with a circular-headed window overlooking the garden of ornamental flower-beds, fruit-bearing box trees, mulberry trees and other exotic plantings. "As you entered the governor's mansion, to the right was the drawing or reception room, with furniture of bird's-eye maple covered with rich damask. Out of this opened the dining-hall [...] in which Hancock gave the famous breakfast to Admiral D'Estaing and his officers," reported Eliza G. Gardner, who lived in the Manor for many years.

John Hancock House, painting by Charles Furneaux, c.1859.

The house was occupied by Lt.-Gen. Hugh Percy during the British Army's 1775-1776 Siege of Boston, and then Gen. Henry Clinton set up his headquarters there, all while Hancock was in Philadelphia as President of the Second Continental Congress, and shortly before he inscribed his venerable "John Hancock" on the Declaration of Independence. After the Second Treaty of Paris concluding the Revolutionary War in 1783, Hancock entertained luxuriantly at his Manor, attracting the likes of le Comte d'Estaing, le Marquis de Lafayette, and, yes, George Washington, and Hancock lived there as the first and third Governors of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. On his death bed he dictated his will to give his home to the Commonwealth but died before the will could be finalized in writing.

Protest sign calling for the preservation of Hancock Manor. Courtesy of Historic New England.

Following many failed attempts to preserve Hancock Manor – ultimately because the Legislature were too preoccupied with Civil War matters to agree upon the terms of acquiring the house – it was sold at public auction for $230 on June 16, 1863, and demolished, despite a rallying cry to preserve this icon of history. But its demise sparked one of the first historic preservation movements, which led to the salvation of Boston's Old South Meeting House (1729) and Old State House (1711).

Ultimately, we lost Hancock's historical treasure for nothing, for the fancy rowhouses that replaced it were removed for the construction of the State House's marble wings in 1916, leaving but a ghost of what once stood there and should still be standing there today, as well as a plaque marking its sad site:

Ebenezer Hancock House at night. Photo by Ryoko Sha.

So Ebenezer Hancock's old haunts are all the architecture we have left to memorialize John Hancock's immeasurable legacy in the growth of our city, the founding of our Commonwealth, and the declaration of our independence as a nation. Now that the house is under new ownership, it'll be interesting to find out what ghost will haunt it now, and how well it'll preserve the ghosts of the past...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

A West End wonder

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:46:52 +0000

Photo by Alexander Tang.

Boston's West End is notorious for being bulldozed into a memory in the 1950s and 1960s, displacing an entire immigrant community with the big-box high-rises of Charles River Park. However, a low-rise gem hides behind a near-jungle on Cambridge Street as a paradigm of how pure geometry can define, shape and organize a quiet study space.

The West End Branch of the Boston Public Library, built in 1968 from an unusual hexagonal design by Eugene Kennedy of Maginnis, Walsh & Kennedy, also presented the hexagon as a considerable exterior space saver and interior space economizer, allowing the placement of books along its perimeters so that they left an open-concept central space for many different kinds of library activities at once, all within a small footprint.

Now, with proposals in the offing to replace the West End Branch Library and top it with 119 units of housing, I had to revisit it before it went the way of the West End.

Its footprint yields acreage for not only parking, but also a peace garden to introduce the entrance with a calming intimation of the peace and quiet one expects in a library.

The garden, the path from the street, the ceiling-high window walls, and the open porch all present us with a very friendly gesture of welcome to the library, giving us an external indication of the generous sitting space and reading light we're in for when we pass the book-sale carts in the vestibule and enter the main room.

Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Rachel Moon.

Sure enough, the room is one open, bright, fluid atmosphere with light (natural and fluorescent) extending to all, in-the-round displays of over 20,000 books of all subjects extending space to all, a myriad of seating options. and a deluge of activities open to all. These include exercise and tai chi classes, movie discussions, story hours, technology instruction, and origami, LEGO and construction clubs.

Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Rachel Moon.

Kennedy wisely designed the interior as a hexagon within a hexagon. This created a smaller hexagonal central space with a slightly dropped ceiling installed with circular "moon" lights. Picking up on a mode of lighting in Alvar Aalto's Baker House dormitory at MIT, this scheme shed extra light on the office-reference desk below. The open shelves pick up on the hexagon theme to create mini-hexagon study spaces.

Interior, West End Branch, BPL. Photo by Alexander Tang.

This open-access concept was mirrored in the librarians' accessibility when school paper assignments brought me to the West End Branch Library, a short walk from my Beacon Hill home. For a biology report on hibernation of bears and social studies papers on U.S. westward expansion and Sudbury's colonial settlement, the librarians helpfully supplied me with the books I needed to get an A each time.

Old West Church (1806) as West End Branch Library, c.1920.

Interestingly enough, the modernism of the West End Branch originated in the classicism of the Old West Church, when it was a library from 1896 until the "urban renewal" of the West End forced its closure in 1960. Designed by Asher Benjamin in a Federal style with pilasters, panels and a cupola-crowned clock tower, it was built in 1806 for a Congregational fellowship to replace a church damaged by British forces in 1775. Rev. Charles Lowell, who commissioned the new church, was a major abolitionist who desegregated seating in the church, sheltered renegade slaves in the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, and provided Sunday school for people of all economic backgrounds. In 1887, the congregation dissolved, and Andrew Wheelwright purchased the church to preserve it and turned it over to the city for library use, for which its column-supported open space (below) served it very well – as sort of a model for the columned hexagonal central space of its successor.

Old West Church, West End Branch Library interior, c.1930.

Jewish Book Weeks and immigrant literacy services were offered at the library for West Enders, courtesy of Fanny Goldstein, its head librarian from 1919 to 1957 and Massachusetts' first Jewish librarian. Shortly before the building's reconversion to a church – this time with a Methodist congregation – John F. Kennedy cast his ballot there on the eve of his historic presidential election in 1960.

The one-story height and generous setback of the West End Branch Library's new home made it a polite neighbor for Cambridge Street's extant historic West End structures, the First Harrison Gray Otis House (1796, Charles Bulfinch) and Old West Church, by virtue of its lowly deference to its elders. By contrast, the library-housing tower proposals for the site look rather corporate and would add to the skyscraperization of the West End by dwarfing its landmark next-door neighbors and making them look even more like "holdouts" from urban renewal. So I'm not too thrilled about it, aside from its provision of much-needed affordable housing in our housing crisis.

I would preserve the West End Branch Library as a modernist landmark, for its use of innovative geometrics to create a model of the free-to-all inclusiveness that befits a public library design.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Co-op vs. condo

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:46:56 +0000

This stately 17-story residence (actually 16-story, not counting the missing 13th floor that would have spooked the superstitious away from buying it) on Park Avenue in New York was built in 1925-26 from a Classical/Georgian Revival design by Henry C. Pelton, before he co-designed NYC's landmark Riverside Church with Allen & Collens in 1930.

This was my second New York home, where I lived for seven years, from age 3 to age 10, when my family moved to Boston. Here we had it all:

A green-canopied entry to a mirror-paneled lobby.

A uniformed doorman (Vito) who summoned taxis with the shrill of a whistle.

A superintendent (Mr. Johnson) and a maintenance man (Gus) who took care of everything.

Two elevators, one with an elevator man, until its push-button replacement made him go the way of the milkman.

A side-alley service entrance where gourmet groceries from Fraser-Morris were dropped off to the well-to-do.

Birthday and Halloween parties and musical recitals with great neighbors.

Short walks to school and shopping, movies around the corner, Central Park two blocks away.

This was a co-op.

This equally stately 5-story residence on Beacon Hill in Boston was built in 1911 from a Classical/Federal Revival design by Richard Arnold Fiske as floor-through French flats replacing an 1837 Mt. Vernon Street townhouse and a Pinckney Street rowhouse in the rear. The townhouse had marked the site of the c.1804 home of Jonathan Mason, one of the Mount Vernon Proprietors who had developed Beacon Hill (who also included Charles Bulfinch, architect of the gold-domed Massachusetts State House two blocks away, and the West Front of the U.S. Capitol).

This was my first Boston home, where I lived for two years, from age 10 to age 12 going on 13, when my family relocated to a rent-controlled apartment a block away due to major setbacks in my father's architecture career. Here we had a lot, if not all:

A gated front walk for me to play Catch, Dodgeball, and Red Light/Green Light with the neighbors' kids (one was my first crush).

A well-manicured front garden.

A vintage Otis caged elevator.

A courtyard patio that my father paved with bricks.

Two bedrooms for me.

A loyal, cooperative homeowners' association.

Frontage on what Henry James, who resided at No. 102, called "the most proper street in Boston."

Short walks to school and shopping, the Boston Common two blocks away, the Esplanade at the end of the street.

This was a condominium.

So what's the difference between the two? And which is the better choice for you?

In brief: A co-op involves collective shareholder ownership of the whole building. A condo involves individual ownership of a unit within a collectively maintained residential community and its shared areas and amenities.

Each is a homeowners association (HOA) in which you share amenities with neighbors, and all are collectively responsible for upkeep of common areas, structural elements and exteriors, the payment of monthly fees to do so, and the minimization of conflicts that can impede the civil living with others under a common umbrella roof that characterizes both HOAs.

So, given each option's pros and cons, which is the better choice for you depends on what assets you're most comfortable with, what liabilities you can best put up with, the degree of autonomy you want over your unit, your long-term home ownership and investment goals, and a host of other considerations. Here's the scoop on each option:

Co-op

In a co-op you're not really a homeowner, but a shareholder who buys a share of stock in the corporate entity that owns the building. This grants you the right to occupy your unit according to the terms of a proprietary lease that accompanies the stock certificate you receive upon moving in.

So you don't actually own your unit as physical property, and you may have to get corporation approval to renovate it, depending on the co-op bylaws.

But that's nicely balanced with other privileges that are unique to a co-op and not always found in a condominium. These include:

A more streamlined way to pay monthly expenses: one lump-sum fee typically covers insurances, maintenance, salaries for hired staff (doorman, superintendent, etc.), property taxes, and sometimes the whole building's underlying mortgage.
Potential election to the board that handles the co-op's operations and maintenance expenses, pays insurances and staff wages, and tries to keep the peace in the community.
Having a say in how the organization is run and maintained, and who can join the co-op.

Which means you actually have a say in who your neighbors-to-be will be, in the framework of fair housing laws. You can cast a 'no' vote for an applicant with a substance abuse issue; a couple engaged in domestic violence; a candidate with an alimony, child support obligation, new car loan or other financial encumbrance; or whoever you have a gut feeling would default on the mortgage and/or monthly fee, spurn the cooperative attitude that defines a co-op, or make an Animal House out of the premises. Depending on what the co-op bylaws state about new occupant approval, anywhere from a majority of nay votes to a single dissenter can blackball undesirables from becoming your new neighbors.

Which could work against you, the applicant, even if your lender has green-lighted your mortgage. A co-op board's screening process for new members can be stringent. You may have to cough up multiple income tax returns, bank/asset statements, credit histories, previous homeownership and/or rental payment records, and other proof of your ability to handle monthly co-op expenses. The board may also look at your loan to determine your loan-to-value ratio (LTV), or the percentage of the co-op share's price the unit buyer may finance. Many co-op boards call for an LTV of under 75%; some may even demand up-front payment of the whole unit price, to ensure that you don't default and are free and clear to make the co-op fee every month. You may even have to have an individual interview with each resident to make sure everyone is comfortable having you aboard.

The board approval process could also stymie your sale of your co-op unit if you decide to move, since each new buyer of a share in the corporate entity must be rubber-stamped by the board. Which is one reason many homebuyers prefer the semi-autonomy of a unit in a...

Condominium

In a condominium you're still accountable to the HOA. But this time you're a homeowner, owning title to your unit plus a share of the common areas and amenities—grounds, lobby, gym, lounge, etc. Your ownership is limited to your unit's interior if the condo is a multifamily building, or your entire "house" if the condo is an aggregate of townhouses or freestanding homes. The monthly condo fee is set by the HOA board based on the amounts and costs of common services, e.g., maintenance of grounds, exteriors, gyms, decks and elevators; master insurance on the complex; water and sewer connections; and security, including concierge and doorman. A condo fee is usually lower than a co-op fee, because it doesn't include property taxes, which are individually levied on each unit.

The condo's HOA meets periodically to discuss such issues as expenses, maintenance, bringing a pet into a unit, or any problems anyone has with anyone else. The standard HOA has a board elected by the HOA members; it may include a president, VP, treasurer or comptroller, secretary for recording meeting minutes, etc.

However, admission to a condo is contingent upon a lender's approval of the homebuyer's loan rather than HOA board approval, so the co-op privilege of picking your neighbors is less common in a condo. Moreover, condo unit owners may sublet their units, which gives you even less say over who you're about to abut.

For the most control of who your condo neighbors will be, it's best to meet with members of the HOA of the condo you're considering before making an offer on a unit there. Important questions to ask them include:

• How do you get along?

• How do you resolve conflicts?

• What kinds of conflicts tend to occur?

• How are decisions made on condo fee fund use?

• What is the makeup of the board?

• How often does it meet?

• How are members elected?

• What unit alterations are subject to board approval?

• Are pets allowed? What kinds, and how many?

• Are unit subleasing and guest parking allowed?

As with a co-op, you should also ask to review as many kinds of HOA documents as you can: board meeting minutes, HOA policies and bylaws, HOA rules and regulations, financial statements including invoices and tax audits, insurance policies, and anything else readily available to HOA members.

This review will help you see how issues are discussed, conflicts resolved, funds appropriated, money managed, services rendered and billed, etc., to decide whether a particular HOA is for you. (A section of a standard purchase-and-sale agreement [P&S] gives you the right to do this before going forward with a unit's purchase, and to terminate the P&S if you don't like any HOA policies.)

So which is the better choice for you?

Since I was just a kid when I lived in the aforementioned co-op and condo, I couldn't possibly say which was the better choice for my parents (ultimately neither, owing to my dad's career demise), though both had strong neighbor communities—particularly the condominium, where the neighborhood extended beyond the building to other residences on close-knit Beacon Hill, presenting great opportunities for Halloween trick-or-treating, Christmas caroling, babysitting for the neighbors, garden tours, and other activities.

But what's best for you, the present homebuyer, depends on your long-term homeownership, investment and social goals.

For one, keep in mind that interactions with co-op neighbors will probably be more frequent than those with condo neighbors, because the collective responsibility for a co-op's common services and the accountability toward the building-owning corporation demands more continual attention from everyone.

In a condo, however, it's common to have monthly HOA meetings with your neighbors, say hi to them in the hall during the week, and retreat into the shell of your own unit. So co-ops are not for extreme privacy lovers. But in a co-op you're more likely to get along with your neighbors, since each was pre-approved by the others. And if you plan to stay for a long time, a co-op is a good way to make long-term friends and connections, which the more come-and-go nature of condos tends to impede.

Regarding investment, as I mentioned, in a co-op you do not possess physical property but purchase shares of the stock through which the housing cooperative owns the building. This may limit your unit's equity.

Leasing co-ops, in which the corporate entity leases but does not own the property, give you no equity.

Limited equity co-ops, in which the board controls the price at which you may buy or sell shares in the co-op, give you just that—limited equity for the limits imposed on your unit's purchase or sale price.

Market-rate co-ops enable you to buy or sell shares according to their market rates.

So the appreciation of a co-op unit's value depends on that of its purchased shares of stock in the corporate entity, as well as the housing cooperative's degree of control over their prices. This may not assure you a lucrative sale of your unit if you relocate. (The value of shares could even drop.)

A condo unit, however, is more likely to appreciate in value according to real estate markets rather than stock markets. Besides, the unit can be subleased for rental income while waiting for its market value to rise enough to consider a sale – not an option in a co-op, because of its corporate and financial structure.

Yet a co-op can stabilize real estate value during recessions or economic downturns by the powers of their boards to reject applicants not financially stable enough to maintain a co-op's fiscal solidity over time.

This could help a co-op building evade bank foreclosure, allowing its economically viable residents to remain there in good and bad times.

So a co-op may be a better investment in a long-term community and stable housing stock, whereas a condo may be a better real estate investment. Either way, you get community and convenience in addition to the comforts of home. It's up to you!

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Co-ops vs. Condos. What's the difference?" The Gold Team at eXp Realty, https://www.thegoldteamny.com/co-ops-vs-condos-whats-the-difference/

Gassett, Bill. "What is a Condominium Homeowners Association (HOA)?" Maximum Exposure Real Estate, January 14, 2014, https://www.maxrealestateexposure.com/condominium-home-owners-association-hoa/#:~:text=A%20condominium%20HOA%20differs%20from%20a%20regular%20homeowners,for%20instance%2C%20shares%20the%20roof%20of%20that%20unit.

Gottlieb, Steven. "Condo, Townhouse or Co-op: Which is Right for You?" U.S. News and World Report, December 11, 2019, https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/condo-townhouse-or-co-op-which-is-right-for-you

HOA Manager. "Do Your HOA Board Members Know Which Documents are Open for Review?" Hignell HOA Management, January 24, 2015, https://blog.hignellhoa.com/do-your-hoa-board-members-know-which-documents-are-open-for-review

Mburugu, Charles. "Condo vs. Co-op: Which is the Better Real Estate Investment?" Mashvisor, April 24, 2020, https://www.mashvisor.com/blog/condo-vs-co-op-which-better-investment/

Novoryta, B.J. The Yellow Brick Road to Buying a Home. Sedalia, Colo.: Castle Pines Realty, 2019.

Palumbo, Richard, LLC. "Understanding the Difference Between Condos, Co-ops and HOAs in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut." Palumbo Law, August 19, 2020, https://richardpalumbo.com/2020/08/19/understanding-the-difference-between-condos-co-ops-and-hoas-in-rhode-island-massachusetts-and-connecticut/

Sager, Jeanne. "Co-op vs. Condo: What's the Difference Between These Types of Homes?" Realtor.com, November 6, 2017, https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/condo-vs-co-op/

'Harry Potter' closet rehabs

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:35:56 +0000

From the Harry Potter Studio Tour London. Photo courtesy of Amber Primdahl, She's Catching Flights.

That "cupboard under the stairs" Harry Potter was miserably forced to hole up in by his abusive aunt, uncle and cousin until receiving his life-changing letter of acceptance to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry can also be a source of misery or wizardry for homeowners, depending on whether they see it as a goldmine for rehab or a gaping hole for nothing.

Since a stair must hog hall space to provide needed upstairs access, it may vex homeowners with the way the cavern it leaves underneath usurps living space. Or if storage, kitchen, bathroom, sleeping, laundry or whatever space is at a premium, the homeowner may not remember the buried treasure under the treads, awaiting wizardly wisdom for a rework to fulfill a crucial spatial need.

I was thinking about that while looking at a townhouse I was writing about for the now-defunct Boston Homes magazine, and the real estate agent pointed out the "Harry Potter closet" under the main stair. I opened its mysterious arched door to see a bulletin board, nearly flush with the under-stair wall. All very well, but denying the potential for creative use of the space beyond.

Of course, a bedroom like Harry's wouldn't be suitable for that space, because of the poor ventilation, light and leg-room he was given (which clearly didn't concern his extended family). But if the door and part of the wall were taken away, the space could become a comfortable sleeping nook for a child or guest, or perhaps a temporary landing spot for the homeowner if, say, the primary bedroom is being renovated or is recovering from flood or fire damage.

Who could sleep in this cranny would naturally depend on the length of space the stair allots for it. Higher risers and shorter treads would yield space enough for a small-to-mid-sized child, because it would make the space more vertical. But lower risers and longer treads would put more horizontality into it, suiting it for taller people.

And it needn't be limited to the bed. This example includes bookshelves and lights, making the space a cozy reading-in-bed retreat.

Photo courtesy of r/CozyPlaces on Reddit.com.

Here's another example of under-stair sleeping/library space, making even more of those tight quarters by sliding storage drawers underneath, possibly for bedding or slippers. It's cozier than the previous example – as little of the wall as possible was removed (probably just the door) for the greater enclosure that grants the hideaway safety we often need for a good night's sleep, but with the entry staying open so we're not Harry Pottered into claustrophobic suffocation.

Photos courtesy of HomeDcorHub.

But if your overflow of books calls for just a library under the stairs, bookshelves are among the easiest to wedge under that wedge of space, because the underbellies of the stairs could act like bookends in themselves, determining where to put the divisions between the shelves. And, depending on the width of the stairs, the library could also become a cozy reading corner (right).

Courtesy of Bria Hammel Interiors, Pinterest.

Photo courtesy of Lee Taylor, Pinterest.

And if your stairs are really wide, their under-space would be deep enough for a library with a built-in couch or upholstered bench for relaxing on while you're reading (left), with books there to grab above you. This is especially an advantage if your home has a curving bridal staircase (right). Its majestic circular sweep will lend sinuous elegance to your understair library/lounge, which may mean it could accommodate even more books and objets d'art, because no perpendicular walls will meet at the corner and possibly obstruct each other's contents.

Photo courtesy of Marina Sofety, Home Decorating Ideas

Since the COVID-19 era of working remotely from home mandated more office space there, what better place to put it than under the stairs? That way, it's remote from living, dining, entertaining and sleeping activities so work and study won't frustrate them, or vice versa, and their use-designated rooms won't disintegrate into multipurpose malfunction and family fracas. With a designer's imagination, an efficient office can be configured within the stair's underbelly. Tighter shelf spaces at the acute angles can accommodate small office-supply or index-card containers. The broader floor area the stair leaves as it descends to the floor can fit the desk, computer, file cabinets and bulletin board. Bookshelves can be stacked by the higher wall the stair creates as it rises to the upper level.

Of course, this arrangement has its drawbacks: absent a door for light and air's sake, privacy for fuller work concentration and less distraction is also in absentia here. So the best understair office is a "quickie" one for brisker tasks: bill-paying, bookkeeping, looking up info online, emails, etc.

Photo courtesy of TalkDecor

Photo courtesy of Home Designing

If your understair space can be connected to house plumbing (which is easier if it's near the kitchen or a bathroom), it could house a washer and dryer (left), with space to spare for detergent, fabric softener, and maybe a sorting counter.

Or you could wedge in a powder room (right) for guests or any family member needing a quick rest stop before going out, especially if the first floor has no bathroom. Given the privacy a bathroom requires, putting one here would be a good excuse to preserve an understair door, especially if it has historical significance to the house. Or, for better air circulation in the powder room, you could cut away the wall so it just frames the space, and install a new door to fit into the frame.

Photo courtesy of bathrooms.com

It pays to be careful where you put each fixture in a space like this. Since people usually sit down to use the commode, that would best be placed on the side with the lowest headroom. Since all of us stand up to use the sink, that should go under the highest headroom. And, given the darkness and airtightness of this usually windowless space, good lighting and a powerful vent should be installed. (And be sure to leave room for at least one small cabinet for cleaning supplies and deodorant spray.) Again, make sure each fixture, lighting and vent location can be safely linked to your plumbing and electrical networks before deciding to install a powder room in there.

A kitchenette could conceivably be squeezed under the stairs, but that would depend on how broadly they sweep across the space as they go up, and how much headroom they leave for essential elements such as a small fridge or wine cooler, a counter with enough headroom for you to stand up while washing and enough length for a small oven and/or cooktop, and enough shelf/cabinet space for essential tableware. This would be especially handy if the kitchen is on the garden level or upstairs and you need to prepare something fast for guests without troubling them to make them walk up or down stairs, particularly if any of them is mobility-impaired. But, again, be sure a bathroom is near enough so the kitchenette can be plumbed for appliances and sink.

Photo courtesy of Outlook9 Shaw for Under Stairs Wine Cellars

But if all that plumbing isn't feasible for that little space and you still want it to fulfill a kitchenesque function that there isn't room for in your kitchen, your fine selection of libations could go there. Of course, you would have to decide what kinds of spirits would best fit there. If you want to store red wines, you could simply install wine-bottle cubbies and use the space as is, since red wines must be kept at room temperature.

But if you want to store white wines, champagnes and/or imported beers, you would need refrigeration. So you would have to reconfigure the space for a wine cooler—either a standard-sized Sub-Zero or a deluxe wine-cellar cooler custom-designed to fit into more of the space. The latter would need a controllable thermostat so you can serve your drinks to your guests (or yourself, for an end-of-the-day nightcap by the TV, Super Bowl Sunday, or a pop of the cork to celebrate a milestone with your loved ones) at just their desired temperature. For that, a significant electricity source will have to be installed there, so make sure it can be done.

Not enough wines to fill it all out? Put a wet bar or dry bar in the rest of the space (right), so you can select, serve and swill in one swoop. Make sure to cubby the wine bottles in the lower part of the triangle and build in the bar and shelves in the upper part, to allow space for glassware, shakers, mixes and other bartenders' supplies.

Photos courtesy of AllDayChic

Photo courtesy of Pinterest

But if general storage is more wanting than wine storage—especially when toys, books, magazines, sports equipment, games, puzzles, coffee mugs, clothes, sweats, sneakers, shoes, skates, etc., etc., pile up beyond capacity—that understair cavity is practically made to order for that, since most underutilized, overlooked or wasted spaces tend to become storage receptacles anyway, Understair storage can take too many forms to go into here. But the storage drawers, cabinets, closets or cubbies should always be designed to use as much of that awkward triangular space as possible.

The pull-out side-loading drawers in the upper left image are a splendid example, with the triangular leftovers functioning as shelves for all those little things that tend to get lost in closets or dresser-drawers. The drawers in the center seem to step up with the stairs, and the residual triangles are nicely paneled as attractive ornaments. The French-doored closets on the right lend domestic elegance to the stair while housing a lot of "storables."

The shelves in the immediate left image attractively showcase all sorts of things, presenting them as household treasures, and leaving space for whatever is behind the left-hand door.

Yet there's another household treasure that could really use a space like this—especially in colder months—and could adapt to it best of all: your canine companion. The slant in the stairs suggests a doghouse, and one of these examples of indoor doghouses follows the slant as part of its "roof," which your dog may recognize as home if you have an outdoor doghouse. Besides, it's roomier than most doghouses, with space for supper and water dishes, a little play, a lot of sleep, and, first and foremost, total protection against the elements, while still feeling like home.

You can also make a young child feel more at home by carving out a playhouse under your stairs. Here are but six examples of how playful you can make your playhouse, giving children the illusion of coming home to their dream house, and a place to play with their friends in secrecy and autonomy. They can be illuminated, painted and decorated inside to make them more home-like. When your child outgrows the space, a dog could take it over, for a greater sense of dignity than just living "in the doghouse."

Photo courtesy of Odd Stuff Magazine.

But if your budget is limited—money-wise or space-wise—your Harry Potter closet can simply be a space to make or take a phone call in private, like the phone booths of yore. The door could be retained for the sake of confidential conversations, and very minimal furniture and lighting is necessary: a small chair, perhaps a tiny table, and a flashlight if necessary.

That, by the way, was how my college fraternity used its understair space. Being under a very short flight of stairs that introduced the main flight on a right angle with it, it was too cramped for much use. So they installed a permanent phone in there, back when analog landline wall phones with extendable twisted cords were still in vogue (remember the one in your parents' kitchen?).

"After." Courtesy of Red Door Home.

"Before." Courtesy of Red Door Home.

Yet they attempted to put the space to its most practical (and costly) use of all: a second egress from the basement to comply with fire codes. They sawed out the floor, only to replank it after the frat president never heard from the builder and announced, "The stair is in limbo and may not be built at all." There were likely no funds for it—perhaps because they were later blown on a frivolous gable extension for an upstairs party lounge or studio suite. (Besides, the frat was in arrears with the college and was eventually shut down.)

Which goes to show how a phone closet remains one of the most economical ways to reuse a Harry Potter closet (next to a kids' game of Hide-and-Seek, a teens' game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, or a private place for anyone of any age to have a little cry if they need to).

Yet, as this image and the one way above show, a homeowner whose stair happens to run along the inside of one of the house's outer walls has an opportunity to bring light into this dark corner by adding a window. The "phone booth" benefits from an oculus, and this reading/fainting couch benefits even more from a quarter-circle window handsomely designed to just fit under the stairs and make a showpiece out of that space, as an energy-saving measure in daytime and a dash of elegance in a typically ignored corner.

Photo courtesy of Beautiful Bedrooms, London, UK

If that space is big enough—especially if privileged to be under a windowed mezzanine landing like this—a window could even turn it into a full bedroom or playroom, giving Harry Potter his much-needed light, ventilation and play space, not to mention a more direct escape to Hogwarts School.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

A Chipotle off the old block

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:53:14 +0000

William D. Ticknor, February 21, 1857, Maturin Murray Ballou's Pictorial

Whenever a historic landmark is rebranded as a familiar restaurant, café or retailer, it loses a lot of its historical identity and drowns in the sea of chains that are making everywhere look like everywhere else. Such has been the struggle of Boston's Old Corner Bookstore virtually since its most lionized tenant, Ticknor & Fields, moved out in 1864 and its last bookstore left in 1903.

Now it is known primarily as the ever-familiar Chipotle Mexican Grill, where anyone can slip inside for a grab-and-go taco or Mission burrito and motor without ever knowing that this building was once a choice haunt of the likes of Alcott, Dickens, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Tennyson, Thoreau, and other literary figures, many of whom met here at the Saturday Club to schmooze about the latest in letters before taking their monthly repasts at the Parker House Hotel down the street. Many Chipotle customers don't even get a sense of when the building was built – 1718 – unless they bother to stop and read the green plaque on the wall, which is so upstaged by Chipotle's in-your-face signs it often escapes notice.

Commuters are likely more captivated by the mouthwatering colors, eating and mingling they could find inside any old Chipotle than the intricate brickwork, brownstone quoins and slate gambrel roof that are more telling about the old building's one-of-a-kind history.

Which I'll share with you now, so you'll really know what you're going into the next time you get a craving for a quesadilla.

It was built in 1718 by Thomas Crease as his residence and apothecary shop on the site of Anne Hutchinson's home, which had burned down in the Great Boston Fire of October 2, 1711, after she was banished from Massachusetts in 1637 for anti-Puritan heresy. The first bookstore to occupy the house, in 1828, was Carter & Hendee. Ticknor & Fields had set up shop in there by 1844, at which time it became a major mecca for Boston's literati, having sparked "positive literary and intellectual magnetism" since the bookstore's occupancy, according to writer David Emblidge.

More than a store, it became a haven "to gather and exchange greetings and ideas," according to The Boston Daily Globe. In Sitting Room No. 2, writers exchanged lively anecdotes and views, which could be nuggets of inspiration for their literary pursuits – a far cry from Chipotle's upstairs "sitting room," where the modus operandi is eat-and-split.

"Charles Dickens Reading to his Family" by C.I. Doughty.

Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and others could be seen in literary parley in Sitting Room No. 2. Ticknor & Fields even published Dickens' works for the first time in America. James Thomas Fields coordinated Dickens' historic 1867 visit to Boston, during which he gave the first public reading of A Christmas Carol in the U.S. at Tremont Temple, acting out his legendary story of miserliness, spiritual renewal and redemption with voices, gestures and expressions of Ebenezer Scrooge, Jacob Marley's ghost, the Three Spirits, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, and other memorable characters. Many local literary figures were present for the reading, including Emerson, Longfellow and Lowell, and it was received with resounding plaudits, helping to fuel the story's everlasting popularity and holiday appeal.

Other British authors Ticknor & Fields published works of included Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as such New England authors as Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau.

Eminent literary works published by Ticknor & Fields in their first editions included: The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's historical novel set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century, in 1850; Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe's anti-slavery novel, in 1852; Thoreau's Walden, in 1854; The Courtship of Miles Standish, Longfellow's narrative poem concerning the Mayflower Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, in 1858; and Little Women, Alcott's coming-of-age novel about the maturation of four sisters, published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869.

Walden featured on its title page a vignette of the square cabin in the woods Thoreau had built on woodland owned by Emerson near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and had stayed in from July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847, during the transcendentalist social experiment in simple living and self-reliance in natural surroundings he conducted and later chronicled in his book.

The Atlantic Monthly was founded in a back room at Ticknor & Fields in 1857 as a major literary, cultural and political periodical that included commentary on the abolition of slavery and other hot-button issues of the day.

Under the founding editorship of James Russell Lowell, the magazine premiered such seminal works as Paul Revere's Ride, Longfellow's poetic Civil War message to Northerners to rally for the nation's founding ideals of freedom through the example of a Revolutionary patriot (and a perennial standard for classroom reading and rote memorization), in 1861; and Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe's rallying cry for the Union to crusade for human freedom in the Civil War, running right on the front page in 1862.

The periodical is still published today as The Atlantic.

Following William Davis Ticknor's death in 1864, Ticknor & Fields had outgrown its home and relocated to Tremont Street, opening the building up to a succession of five new booksellers, beginning with E.P. Dutton in November 1864 and ending with its namesake, the Old Corner Bookstore, in 1902.

Interior of Old Corner Bookstore, 1891.

Though Old Corner occupied it for only one year, its name stuck and made it "still the favorite haunt of the author and the reader," as The Washington Post put it, despite presently being the favorite haunt of the jalapeño junkie. "But Ticknor & Fields' successors moved the store away from Old Corner in 1903 and the toboggan-slide from fame began," reported The Herald News in 1960.

And they weren't kidding. As you can see from the shifting of signage in the chronology of images below, the Old Corner Bookstore post-Ticknor attracted a stream of other commercial tenants, furthering its devolution from an erudite intellectual salon to a generic shopper's world, all the while retaining its basic colonial form as a plea for salvation:

This final photo, taken in 1960, shows the Old Corner Bookstore at its nadir as a combination billboard building and beanery, totally obscured from its literary glory. Thus sparked the rallying cry for its preservation, which Mayor John F. Collins made possible by encouraging the formation of the Old Corner Committee, chaired by historian Walter Muir Whitehill, author of Boston: A Topographical History. The committee raised the full $275,000 needed to buy the building and the adjacent Cunningham House from developer Samuel P. Coffman, who had planned to replace it with a motel, and Whitehill co-founded Historic Boston Inc. to own and operate the restored Old Corner Bookstore.

In 1964, its new tenant was The Boston Globe, and its restoration returned it to a conjectural image of its appearance spanning 1718-1828, with sash windows of wobbly glass replicating 18th-century handmade glazing in a forced, fake way akin to Colonial Williamsburg. The abutting Andrew Cunningham House, first built in 1728, was restored in time for the Bicentennial of 1976.

Old Corner Bookstore, 2009. Photo by Céline Harrand.

What I've always liked best about the Old Corner Bookstore is its corner anchorage of an historic block, not being a "holdout" amid newer abutters that raise the question of what occupied their sites before. The left-hand "wing" block was developed in 1828 by Timothy Harrington Carter of Carter & Hendee, Old Corner's first bookstore.

The Globe Corner Bookstore, 1988. Photo by Russell Kord.

What I've always liked least, of course, is its failure to maintain a proper tenant that fully honors its history and heritage. It was on the right track when The Globe Corner Bookstore (left), a retailer of travel literature and New England-related books, occupied it from 1982 until 1997, when it was squeezed out by overhead costs and competition with the big-box Borders Books and Barnes & Noble chains down Washington Street. After a brief fling as The Boston Globe Store souvenir shop and Internet café, followed by an Ultra Diamonds jewelry-chain tenancy in 2005 (above), the Old Corner Bookstore regrettably became another Chipotle Mexican Grill in 2011, which emblazoned it with its commonplace brand signs that mar the history it's supposed to bespeak to Freedom Trailers. Which means the Old Corner Bookstore is back to its old self as a bastion of commercial tenant switcheroos, this time as a Chipotle off the old block.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Bowdoin Beata – Part IV

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:16:18 +0000

Bowdoin College, c.1907.

Hubbard Hall and Walker Art Building, Bowdoin College, c.1910.

The turn of the 20th century saw Bowdoin College welcoming new, untested architectural styles to its campus, in an attempt to transition itself away from its image of a small college with a chapel, tucked away in a corner of a small college town, to the appearance of a prominent academic institution with appropriately ceremonial buildings to publicly display that status. Memorial Hall's grandiloquent Gothic presence was a good start (see my last post), but now it was time for more architectural symbols of scholastic and artistic excellence in the arts and sciences to round out the Bowdoin Quadrangle.

Searles' solemnity

The Mary Frances Searles Science Building (1894) had a bad rap on campus. Legend had it that the descendants of its namesake were out to build "the ugliest building possible" because they'd been cut out of her late husband's will when his money was left to build it. Though I wasn't much for its purplish paint job – wondering what that covered up – it was one of those buildings I found myself stopping and staring at.

Which is a litmus test for great architecture: the extent to which it makes you stop and stare, and for how long. (No wonder I kept ignoring the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.) And why was the Searles Building worth a special look? Because it had the majestic presence of an old English or Danish castle, of the kind Hamlet would home in, owing in part to the predilections of its architect, Henry Vaughan, a Brit by birth and Edward Francis Searles' favorite architect (they built the famed Methuen Memorial Music Hall in Massachusetts together) for Elizabethan and Jacobean (known as "Jacobethan" in combo) stylistic elements in his designs.

East Boston High School (1926, John M. Gray Company). Photo by Antony.22.

The Searles Building also recalled those Gothic and Jacobethan schools and colleges in New York I fondly remembered – Erasmus Hall High School, Flushing High School, City College of New York, many others – as well as the welcoming octagonal twin turret-towers flanking the entrance of East Boston High School. In short, Searles' style said two things: scholarship and showmanship.

Mary Frances Searles Science Building (1894). Photo by Dirk Ingo Franke.

Which were part of the building's intent: to unify the Biology, Chemistry and Physics Departments under one roof that promoted their academic reputation through a regal design of high Dutch gables, octagonal crenellated turrets, domed lance-like towers flanking the entrance, oriel bay windows, Amherst sandstone trim and finials, and a crowning classical cupola, all reflecting the repute of the likes of Oxford and Cambridge.

The Maine Street elevation of the Searles building takes the form of a pair of identical gabled rear ells enclosing a courtyard on three sides. Vaughan designed it just so to allow the laboratory-lecture halls in the ells as much daylight as possible, picking up on the natural illumination architecture for scientific classrooms and labs established by Seth Adams Hall in 1861 (see my previous post). This courtyard also came in handy for the Searles Building's 1999 renovation and expansion by Cambridge Seven Associates, who filled it in with a 2,000-square-foot granite/glass atrium, a sequence of ramps interconnecting all floors, interdisciplinary communal rooms, and cutting-edge computer/audiovisual high-tech, to bring the Searles Building into the 21st century.

Searles was yet another demonstration of Bowdoin's foresight in the architectural planning of all its buildings, making them just as useful with every passing age, up to and including our IT/AI age.

Sadly, I have no Searles memories to share, never having passed through its doors. I never studied science at Bowdoin, no thanks to its lack of course distribution requirements, which would have given us a well-rounded curriculum by which we would have discovered new interests that opened doors to fulfilling careers.

Thankfully, distribution requirements were restored at Bowdoin, thanks (real thanks) to Prof. Barbara Kaster, who once declared in class, "You folks are being shortchanged by having no distribution requirements!" and set out with her initiative to bring them back, thus benefiting Bowdoiners from Gens X, Y and Z.

Walker's wonders

The Walker Art Building (1897) accomplished for Bowdoin's art collection and curriculum what the Searles Building did for its scientific studies, this time as a classical temple that completed the Bowdoin Quadrangle's eastern parameter with a monumental miniature of some of America's great art museums, from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to the one just down the road in Portland.

To be continued...

Bowdoin Beata – Part III

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 23:54:16 +0000

In 1802, Massachusetts Hall laid the architectural cornerstone for the buildout of Bowdoin College, establishing the red brick construction and Federal/Classical design patterns that would define the development of the campus into the mid-20th century. In 1855, the Chapel was consecrated, giving Bowdoin its definining icon, music sanctuary, time-reminding school bells, budding art gallery and library, and design direction into the turn of the century.

Now I'd like to explore the college buildings the Chapel established a hankering for in the Victorian era, and the Gothic, Neoclassical and Jacobean styles they assumed as a rich variety of newer, grander architectural forms changed the campus character, fulfilling new functions for the broadening diversity of academic interests of the next generations of students.

Adams' abundance

Seth Adams Hall (1861) was built for Bowdoin's Medical School of Maine, the state's first medical college, for which the high ceilings, vast floor areas, and tall windows brought light, space, and vapor-dispersing atmosphere to the school's laboratories, dissections, and medical/surgical instruction.

Seth Adams Hall (1861), Bowdoin College, c.1890.

These features, coupled with the compatibility of its vertical red-brick Italianate Gothic style to Bowdoin's red-brick dorms and the rise of the Chapel, made it made-to-order for some of the college's bigger classes, such as my 52-strong Sociology 1 my freshman year, where I'd feel lost in a sea of students unless I sat way up front, which I always did (though I rarely spoke).

Today Seth Adams Hall houses the Sociology and Anthropology Departments, and was one of the first campus buildings to receive a down-to-the-studs green renovation following the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) guidelines. Kudos to the architectural prestidigitation of Harriman of Maine, Seth Adams Hall has a healthier indoor environment than it did in its heyday, bike racks encourage a pollution-free commute to class, low-flow plumbing with user sensors and innovative wastewater technology reduces water usage by as much as 50%, and energy-efficient lighting and HVAC systems make the indoor environment even healthier. Seth Adams Hall was already a milestone of sustainability with its unusually tall windows letting in more natural sunlight, and it has now gone all the way in its initial design goals.

Memorial's memories

Memorial Hall (1882), no doubt inspired by the Chapel's Gothic soar, granite structure and space-use versatility, underwent a major transformation from a somber war memorial into a dynamic magnet for student and faculty attraction from all nooks, crannies and corners of the campus to a smorgasbord of sparkling spectacles inside. Samuel D. Backus and William Gibbons Preston designed it as a Gothic granite memorial to Bowdoin's 359 Civil War veterans, most notably Brig. Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Class of 1852, who commanded the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry at Gettysburg (holding Little Round Top) and accepted the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for gallantry, and later served as President of Bowdoin College.

Memorial Hall was renovated in 1955 by McKim, Mead & White into the 600-seat Pickard Theatre, opening it up to stage stellar productions by Bowdoin's Masque & Gown theater troupe and the Brunswick Summer Playhouse; vibrant dance performances under the founding choreographic hand of June Adler Vail; the Kenneth V. Santagata Memorial Lecture Series, bringing international speakers of fame and renown to communicate daring, unorthodox perspectives in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to open-minded students; the Bowdoin Film Society's annual Oscar-caliber presentation of the student films generated in Prof. Barbara Kaster's "Flicks" class, and so much more.

Memorable Memorial moments for me were many. I kicked off my first two Bowdoin years by attending Brunswick Summer Playhouse performances of the classic Stephen Schwartz musicals Godspell and Pippin, leaving the theater with a reduced appreciation of the former and a heightened regard of the latter.

I found Godspell too silly, childish and clichéd for my maturing tastes, and I found myself enjoying Pippin more, because it was better staged than the direct-from-Broadway production I'd seen in Boston and disliked intensely, mainly because my father never once applauded throughout it and, after the final curtain call, declared it "a complete dud." Of course, now that I was leaving home and going away to college, I was developing a clean slate and a fresh formation of my own viewpoints, with passionate influence from two female students who persuaded me to appreciate Pippin's philosophical message about finding one's own meaning, identity, and peace of mind, accepting and appreciating the ordinary, and not chasing rainbows in the distance to "find my corner of the sky," as the lead character sang. Good counsel.

Other Pickard perks for me included attending an electrifying Masque & Gown performance of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies, an existentialist retake on Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripedes' myth of Electra and Orestes' quest to avenge the death of their father Agamemnon, King of Argos, by killing their mother Clytemnestra and her husband Aegisthus. (The bearded, portly Zeus actor was despotically godly and very commanding on stage, though I heard he forgot his lines in one performance. So much for godly.) I also remember a production of Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth, a duet of plays exploring interpersonal misunderstanding and miscommunication through marked, and sometimes deliberate, differences in language and expression. Masque & Gown musical productions I saw at Pickard were The Pajama Game, with an expert rendition of "Steam Heat" by future writer Sue Abbattista, and Once Upon a Mattress, where the Sir Harry actor gave me an idea of how I ought to have played the part in my Park School production of it: like a comical stuffed shirt, not the serious stiff nerd I had been.

Tom Stoppard (1937-2025), c.1985.

A Santagata lecture on "The Event and the Text" brought British playwright Tom Stoppard all the way from England to discuss his philosophical insights into society's linguistic, metaphysical and existential foundations. (Along with The Flies, I had studied a work by Stoppard in Prof. Victor L. Cahn's "The Theatre of the Absurd" course my freshman year. The play was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a meditation on determinism and the playing of predetermined roles vs. free will and the freedom to choose one's own path, using two minor characters from Hamlet – Hamlet's university classmates, whom he orders executed in his place as his "whipping boys" – and their actual scenes from Shakespeare's play. Cahn, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Stoppard, later published as Beyond Absurdity, remains my favorite Bowdoin professor.)

But my Pickard peak-experience was accepting the Bowdoin Film Society Award for Best Dramatic Film for my "Flicks" creation, a black-and-white Super-8 short about a shy student who has a crush on a girl who hangs out with more social, clowning students – an autobiographical replay of an actual fraternity experience. (The people I based my film on came – in fact, were invited – to a party scene I was shooting. All of them showed up in the film, they found out my ulterior motive in making it, and one of them threatened legal action.)

But I digress...

Wish Theatre (2000), Memorial Hall (1882). Photo: brsidders, Wikimedia Commons.

Memorial Hall's second major makeover was its extension into Wish Theatre in 2000. It is a flexible, open-concept 150-seat experimental performance space, made possible by a substantial gift from Barry N. Wish '63 and Oblio Wish, for Bowdoin's expanding Theatre Arts Major.

And what progress from my Bowdoin years, when its theatrical offerings were limited – very limited – to Masque & Gown; their sole director, Ray Rutan '51; his few courses on "the fundamentals" of acting, directing, and playwriting; and the Bowdoin Orient's acerbic theater critic, Marc Silverstein, who trashed virtually every one of Rutan's productions with the vitriol of John Simon of New York magazine and Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe, making Ray look like an incompetent amateur. Poor guy.

Wish is a captivating compromise between the modernism there was no turning back from and the historicism Bowdoin is rooted in. It presents a dance of a peaked tower with a skybridge to the old building, a hip-roofed pavilion with Italianate brackets and lace-collar trim, and a cupola-crowned kiosk, all in step with Memorial Hall's Gothic arches and Mansard roof as a theatrical extravaganza that tempts us inside to experience theater, dance, lectures and flicks as we wish they could be.

Seth Adams Hall and Memorial Hall are further examples of Bowdoin buildings planned with foresight, so they could be structurally and spatially adaptable to future social and academic requirements, just as Massachusetts Hall's hipped roof and deep footprint and the Chapel's roomy wings were (see my previous post for details).

To be continued...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Bowdoin Beata – Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:45:20 +0000

Photo courtesy of the Maine Historical Society.

When bright skies were o'er us,

And life lay before us,

'Neath Bowdoin's pines we gathered far and near.

So filling our glasses,

And greeting all classes,

We drink a health to alma mater dear.

So it's clink, clink, drink, drink, drink!

Smash the glass to splinters when you're done.

O Bowdoin Beata,

Our dear alma mater,

There is no fairer mother 'neath the sun.

(Words by Henry H. Pierce, Class of 1896; revised by Anthony Antolini '63, Director of Bowdoin Chorus Emeritus)

Photo by Michelle Stapleton.
My dear alma mater's song captured the polarity of the Bowdoin College experience: the high academic standards of its curriculum vs. the high living that came with the territory of its formerly fraternal social life, in the form of alcohol, drugs, horseplay, and heaven knows what else.

In my previous Bowdoin Beata post I explored the latter situation, and how the fraternity houses moved on from it when they became the College Houses, which revealed their fine architecture as a framework for the intellectual, social and cultural communities I wish had been available to me when I was there.

But now I'd like to focus on my favorite academic buildings at Bowdoin, those that have formed and shaped the college's scholastic identity as I remember it.

Massachusetts' modesty

Massachusetts Hall (1802), Bowdoin's oldest, was built soon after the college was chartered by the Massachusetts State Legislature (remember, Maine was part of Massachusetts then) in 1794, from a Federal design by Aaron & Samuel Melcher III. And it says "Massachusetts" all over, recalling contemporary works of Charles Bulfinch in Boston and Samuel McIntyre in Salem.

This style speaks through its symmetrical façade and chimneys, narrow center entrance with fanlight transom and cornice, hipped roof, simple interior paneling, and the mahogany-railed staircase that curves up to professors' offices and the top-level floor-through classroom. All these elements present the hall in a unified form to the Bowdoin Quad.

Massachusetts Hall, Bowdoin College, in 1884. Photo by Amos O. Reed.

This modest unity of minimal detail and maximal cohesion was also an outgrowth of the financial constraints affecting Bowdoin's development, including rising real estate values. So it was decided to start the campus small, hence Massachusetts Hall's modest, diminished, lowly stature, well atoned for by architectural foresight and planning.

As a result, its small size didn't stop it from supplying multiple faculty offices, including the English and Philosophy departments (until the latter relocated to the Edward Pols House on 5 Bath Road), the Faculty Room, the McKeen Study, and a sizable floor-through top-floor classroom (which barely fit me and the overflow of 30 students in Prof. Geoghegan's Religion 32), which the Hall's high hipped roof and square footprint – almost as deep as it was wide – made possible.

Residential row

Bowdoin College c.1823. Artwork by John G. Brown.

Massachusetts Hall, in a way, spurned the development of the four brick dormitories that were to shape the beginnings of the Bowdoin Quadrangle, by virtue of establishing brick as the building material, rehiring the Hall's architect to design the first dorm, and lining them up along the new campus's western parameter so they would fully border the Quad by the time the last one, Hyde Hall, was built.

Winthrop Hall (1822, Samuel Melcher III), c.1925.

Winthrop Hall (1822) was Samuel Melcher III's follow-up building, and the first of four brick dormitories that formed the western parameter of the Bowdoin Quadrangle, setting it up for future campus development with a "Harvard Yard" appeal. Establishing the standard for Bowdoin's dormitory superblocks followed through the 1950s, Winthrop repeats Massachusetts Hall's narrow center entrance with fanlight transom, but breaks from it with tripartite central windows – portending the 20th-century modernism of "Chicago" windows – and, of course, an added story and a larger footprint for the growing student population.

Note how, by lining up regimentally along the Quad's western parameter, the "street wall" of Winthrop Hall and the subsequent dorms inspired a path along the Quad, confirming its intimate rectangular form.

Maine Hall (1837), designed by Anthony Coombs Raymond, follows Winthrop's standard with nearly identical brick façades and tripartite windows. The arched entrances are a bit wider and more deeply recessed into the façades, perhaps to allow freer inward and outward passage to more students at once, and to grant them pre-entry and pre-exit shelter from the elements.

Maine Hall repeated the pattern of stylistic uniformity in dormitory design that Harvard Yard established when Bulfinch's Stoughton Hall (1805) was built as a near-replication of Hollis Hall (1762). This turned Bowdoin into sort of a "little Harvard," which was of great appeal to me when I was visiting Bowdoin for my application interview (since my dad wished I would go to Harvard).

Appleton Hall (1843) was designed by Samuel Melcher & Sons, who followed in their father's footsteps with the dormitory template set by Winthrop Hall, but with variations according to the shift to the Greek Revival: A squared center entrance with higher stoop, flat lintel and broad keystone underscores the tripartite windows, giving the entry a sense of verticality.

Hyde Hall (1917), designed by Allen & Collens (best known for New York's Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary), is one of three dorms that stretch the Winthrop Hall prototype of 1822 way into the 20th century, the others being McKim, Mead & White's Moore Hall (1941, my freshman dorm) and Coleman Hall (1958). The visible changes in the elevations, heights, chimney placements, entrances, stair-hall windows and cosmetics from one dorm to another as the years progressed showcase a pattern of architectonic adjustment according to the changing needs of new generations of students, the growth of the college and its student body, and the advancement of structural engineering and material manufacturing throughout those years.

Hyde Hall picked up its predecessors' brick facing, center entrance, central tripartite windows and punched rhythm of fenestration, but elongated its front door and one of its tripartite windows, to express and shed light on the upward mobility of the stairwell, which the lowering of one window and the elongation of another clearly expresses as a separate entity from the living quarters. Hyde's basement windows signify the increasing use of basements for practical purposes, such as more advanced plumbing, laundry, gas and electrical facilities. Moore and Coleman moved their entrances from the ends to the sides, allowing for four entries for busy student traffic, with taller stairwell windows above them for more ease of finding one's way to one's room after pulling an all-nighter, getting drunk, or partying the night away (below).

Moore Hall (1941, McKim, Mead & White).

Coleman Hall (1958, McKim, Mead & White).

Chapel's chimes

Bowdoin College Chapel (1855, Richard Upjohn). Photo by Andrew Mass.

Photo by William Morgan.

The Chapel (1855), which completes the western border of the Bowdoin Quadrangle as a cynosure of the campus, is the college's principal landmark, the one that immediately defines its scholastic identity, in many ways: with its twin towers visible from afar, chiming their Westminster Chime on the quarter-hour to remind students, faculty and staff of their obligations and deadlines; with its axial symmetry on its footpath, which served as a compass for future campus development; with its colorful interior and resonant acoustics and organs, serving as Bowdoin's central venue for concerts, recitals, Chapel Talks and lectures; and with the myriad of other ways it has served the college and its community over the years, kudos to its versatile wings.

"Brunswick College Chapel, Brunswick, Me.", rendering by Richard Upjohn, 1845.

Designed by Richard Upjohn, famous for Trinity Church in New York (1846) and the First Parish Church in Brunswick (1846), the Chapel demonstrates, in stature, structure and use, how everlasting the Gothic Revival can be (even with the phase-out of compulsory religious services at Bowdoin in the 1960s), kudos to the same architectural foresight that went into Massachusetts Hall.

With this foresight, the Chapel was planned for mixed uses from the beginning: a central hall for worship and music, a library, and an art gallery. The German Romanesque random-ashlar Brunswick granite shell was given a tripartite scheme that included library and gallery wings.

The Chapel interior is a wonderworld of stained glass, hammerbeam roof rafters, black walnut woodwork, colorful fresoes, two organs (front and rear), and resonant acoustics. This has made it a blessed space for Chamber Choir concerts – I fondly remember singing solos in a Mozart mass and a "new song contest," and the song with my solo was the winner: "Susie Asado," James Sellars' adaptation of a poem by Gertrude Stein. Other fond Chapel memories were Sunday afternoon Chapel Talks, which enabled students and faculty to soapbox their views on a myriad of issues and arguments of mixed merit. An unconvincing one was "The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Fact or Fiction?", in which a Bowdoin Christian Fellowship member used semantics and bombast rather than logic, evidence and deduction to argue for Jesus' ascension:

"This brilliant scholar says that there is overwhelming evidence that the Resurrection really occurred... The results [of his research] stunned him." The student also described the process of death by asphyxiation on the cross and the secure guarding of tombs back then. That was reasonable logic to show the impossibilities of survival of crucifixion and of grave robbery (more logical reasons for the disappearance of Jesus' body), but not to show that the story of Jesus was true. Yes, faith triumphed over reason.

And, oh, the way the sunlight penetrated the stained-glass windows and spotlighted the frescoes, bringing out their rich colors and delicate artistry! Upjohn likely calculated the window placements for the right impacts of light at certain positions of the sun – still more foresight.

He also must have calculated the siting of the sharp-pointed bell towers according to when and how the sun would hit them at various solar positions of the diurnal arc. Which made the towers a handy "sundial" for Bowdoiners: bright towers meant rise and shine (and get to class), and red-orange towers meant bedtime was nigh (unless you were pulling an all-nighter).

The east end of the Chapel's south wing, Banister Hall, originally housed a two-level art gallery, displaying sculptures on its lower floor and paintings upstairs. This was the extent of the college's "art museum" – in rather cramped quarters – until the fine artworks found brighter, roomier breathing space and elbow-room in the Walker Art Building across the Quad in 1894. Banister Hall then housed the Department of Music (which was handy for Chapel concerts and recitals next door) and the Department of Psychology, until they too found new homes, in the Harvey Dow Gibson Hall of Music in 1954 and eventually Kanbar Hall in 2004, respectively.

Today Banister Hall houses the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good, a community service and civic engagement center, and the THRIVE program, supporting first-generation and limited-income students in transitioning into and on from the college experience, and to give them a sense of belonging. (THRIVE was made possible by a major grant from Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings '83.) Very worthy new uses for the spiritual community center the Chapel was built to be!

The library in the opposite wing, despite its beautiful arch, column, bracket and drip moldings and dark walnut woodwork, had but limited capacity for Bowdoin's ever-growing book collection, as the overflowing shelves show here. The completion of Hubbard Hall in 1903 was the answer to the library's prayers.

But in time even Hubbard Hall (center) burst at the seams with books, as the evolution of knowledge dictated, until the functional but drab Hawthorne-Longfellow Library (bottom left), designed by Steinman, Cain & White, assumed the book-burden in 1965, with a much-needed expansion in 1984 and major renovations in 2000 and 2004 by Annum Architects.

(Looking more like an office park than a college library, this is my least favorite building at Bowdoin, so it won't be featured here.)

Other occupants of the wings are the Office for Inclusion and Diversity, the Banister 106 classroom and media presentation room, and a Muslim Prayer Space. The Chapel's wide array of uses attests to the endurance of its granite edifice through the ages, still ringing its bells and boasting its towers from far and wide to declare, "This is Bowdoin."

Class of 1875 Memorial Gateway on axis with Chapel in 1907.

The Chapel's axial path gave rise to future campus growth on that axis. The Class of 1875 Memorial Gateway (1902, McKim, Mead & White) mirrored the duality of the Chapel's towers with twin fluted columns and Grecian urns in the "City Beautiful" classical style. Their axial symmetry with their progenitor framed and reinforced the Chapel's central sanctity to Bowdoin

until the Visual Arts Center (1975, Edward Larrabee Barnes) blocked their view of the Chapel with a new, ominous gateway to the Quad, forcing passage through a dark tunnel to enter the campus – a barbarian byproduct of the modern age that was invading the academic peace of historicism that once blessed Bowdoin.

To be continued...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Bowdoin Beata — Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:55:26 +0000

"Bowdoin Beata" is a song of Bowdoin College, my "dear alma mater," as that old hymn heralds. Beata, from the Latin beatus (blessed), defines Bowdoin architecturally, if not always socially.

Bowdoin College Homecoming, October 2025.

I recently dreamed that I visited the Bowdoin campus in Brunswick, Maine, at a Homecoming event and made the rounds of the old fraternity houses that had been converted to student housing and other uses. In the dream each house sported an emblem or seal (not Greek letters) expressing their individual identities and pride of place. This decorative touch replaced each dwelling's Animal House reputation with a celebration of its new and proper role on campus: to house students as social activity centers and havens of academia. Which prompted me to reflect on the campus architecture to which I had paid little heed when I was there, being too caught up in the shenanigans of the frat scene to appreciate the beauty of the campus that had lain before me all those four years.

MacMillan's majesty

MacMillan House, formerly Theta Delta Chi (TD), was the first house I visited in the dream – which was possibly a recollection of my two sole ventures into its fraternity when I was in college. The first was during the annual Rush Week, when incoming freshmen and others flocked to the beer (and sometimes pot) parties the frats threw to lure, bid and recruit new members. TD's president told me, "Everyone here plays some kinda sport," "We have the highest grade-point average on campus," and "We bid people based mostly on personality." Since I was no jock, and certainly didn't have his personality, I decided then and there that TD was not for me.

This was confirmed when I entered a campus-wide party there a couple of years later. The smell of beer and the loud, confused brouhaha of jibber-jabber predominated the ambiance. "What's your name?" I asked someone. "None a'yuh business!" was the response. Good-bye forever. So you can imagine my dismay when, on my senior year's Drop Night, from the porch of my frat I saw new members "dropping at" (joining) TD in droves (driven by a promo photo of TDers guzzling beer and whooping it up), while my frat got only two new members.

But now that it's no longer TD, I'll talk about what matters most about it: its architecture. Built in 1942 as a private fraternity house for Theta Delta Chi, it was renamed for famed Arctic explorer Donald B. MacMillan '98, when Bowdoin renamed each of its former frat houses after a distinguished alumnus or faculty advisor of that frat.

The house actually replaced an earlier one that had been built in 1904 as Theta Delta Chi's first chapter house on campus, designed by William R. Miller with a wraparound covered porch, steep gables, clustered windows, and picturesque pop-out bay windows, turrets, chimneys and other details. The brochure calling for its replacement called its brown Shingle Style "wrong" with "an absence of any collegiate feeling in its design."

So it was replaced with a stately, traditionalist Georgian Revival design by Felix Arnold Burton '07, in keeping with the "early American" palette that characterized Bowdoin's architecture, according to that brochure. MacMillan House is confidently and coherently massed, as if it really means "business" in housing students. The left-side sunporch, right-side brick extensions, and pediment-crowned center-entrance projection give the house a tempting lure of luxury – which might well have lured some of those new TDers on Drop Night, who knows?

Helmreich's House of the Seven Gables

Helmreich House, formerly Alpha Rho Upsilon (ARU), my fraternity, was renamed after the late Ernst Christian Helmreich, Reed Professor of History and Political Science Emeritus at Bowdoin, the club's original faculty advisor. (His sons were members.) I was tempted to join ARU based on the immediate friendly greeting at the door a female member in a cowgirl hat and neckerchief gave me right when I entered, which didn't occur at any other frat on campus. I was also attracted to the premise on which the frat was founded in 1946, "All Races United" (A.R.U.), so that Jewish and African-American students, and later women, could have a community to belong to.

It also had a reputation as an "anti-fraternity," having been originally founded in 1937 as the Thorndike Club, a dining club for non-frat "indies," under Ernst Helmreich's leadership as its faculty advisor.

That "cowgirl," along with another member, bid me to join ARU the next day. Convinced I had found the right place, I "dropped" there on Drop Night without hesitation, and I picked that girl as my ARU "Big Sister."

ARU was far from anti-frat, as I painfully discovered in my four years there while constantly trying to "make it work." And there were warning signs all along that joining it was my big mistake. Examples: My "Big Sister" immediately left school to get married, just as I was getting to know her. I came in last place in a "Mr. ARU" talent contest I was eager to participate in. My best friend at ARU suddenly transferred to the University of Chicago as soon as he got word that his ARU girlfriend was pregnant. By a margin of one vote, I was elected Orientation Chairman to plan activities for the new frosh members (including their "Hell Night" initiation rites), which put me far behind in my studies. I had two other unrequited crushes there. By my senior year the house was divided into cliques, none of which I comfortably fit into. And so on. So I renounced ARU when I graduated, and it was the first of Bowdoin's remaining frats to close down in 1990, being in extreme arrears with the college.

But from the beginning I was intrigued by the house's architecture and history. It was built c.1900 by George Taylor Files, Professor of German, and his wife Edith Davis Files, who later established the George Taylor Files Professorship of Modern Languages at Bowdoin. The house is an unusual hybrid of Shingle Style and Georgian Revival.

Those two styles were originally thought to be incompatible, the former having been a rebellion against the latter, as you'll see later. But they work in agreeable balance here: the former supplies the rustic shingles, gambrel and picturesque massing of the Shingle Style, while the latter graces it with a Georgian Palladian window within the gable, classical balustrades and Ionic-columned front porch, some clapboard siding, and enough semi-symmetry to keep it in line with Bowdoin's "early American" vernacular.

The side sunroom – ARU's dining/party hall, all-nighter study hall, art exhibit gallery, and milieu of its "Shot-a-Minute" tradition (no comment) – was added before 1952. Since then ARU sprouted several other additions that compromised its symmetry even more.

These included a mid-1980s extension of its side gambrel over the sunroom. An ARU president said it "looks great," but it served little useful purpose except to create an oversized studio apartment for a lucky member (or two, if it was a couple), and to add to the arrears that shut ARU down, initiating the phase-out of all Bowdoin fraternities.

This evolution of Helmreich House truly transformed it into a "House of the Seven Gables" that at least now has the capacity to provide lots of generous spaces for student housing and campus activities.

Burnett's bounty

Burnett House, formerly Phi Delta Psi, was one of Bowdoin's earliest fraternities to close and be converted to student housing. Built in 1858, it was named for two of its owners, Charles Theodore Burnett, Professor of Psychology, and his wife, Sue Winchell Burnett, a cellist who became the namesake of Bowdoin's Sue Winchell Burnett Prize in Music. Eighteen years after Prof. Burnett's passing in 1946, Phi Delta Psi, having newly split from Alpha Tau Omega, occupied his house, but for only six years, at which time it became Burnett House. I fondly remember its large rooms, oversized windows and high ceilings, which made its front living area a pristine location for shooting a party scene in the film I made for Prof. Barbara Kaster's "Flicks" class.

On October 6, 1858, the Brunswick Telegraph reported that the new house's dimensions were "well proportioned, and when the building is completed, the grounds graded, the improvement will add much to the attractiveness of that part of the town." And it does, exemplifying the Italianate style, with matched boards, quoined corners, and projecting lintels, cornice, and porch roof.

Burnett's abundance of rear space and lawn area is another bonus. Later "ell" additions to the house greatly expanded its capacity for student housing – always at a premium on college and university campuses – while concealing themselves from Maine Street to preserve the house's Italianate identity on the street.

Howell's honors

Howell House, formerly Alpha Delta Phi (AD), was built in 1924 as the lodge of Bowdoin's first fraternity. It was renamed for Roger Howell Jr. '58, Professor of History and President of the College. One of the few Americans to teach British history at Oxford University, where he had been a Rhodes Scholar, Howell saw Bowdoin through major social and academic transitions during his presidency: admittance of women for the first time, founding of African-American studies programs and the 12-college exchange program, elimination of SAT admission requirements (Bowdoin was the first college to do so), and erection of Bowdoin's Visual Arts Center, among other milestones.

Alpha Delta Phi members in 1997.

Yet the academic distinction of Roger Howell and the house's architecture was de-emphasized at AD's Rush Week parties. Their main theme was alcohol – as it was at every frat – but with a bit more imagination this time, for better or for worse. AD's libations included "Bad Wines" and "Jim Jones Punch," a tasteless reference to that cult leader in Jonestown, Guyana, who in 1978 forced his "disciples" to drink cyanide-laced Flavor Aid all together, killing 912 of them, followed by himself with a gun to his head, in the largest mass murder-suicide in history, the Jonestown Massacre. Reducing it to a joke like that – especially at a place as erudite as Bowdoin – was in as bad taste as the Bad Wines, which may have turned me off from wanting to drop at AD.

But now that it has been rightfully rechristened in honor of its most honorable member, Howell House stands as a shrine to scholarship, kudos to architect Felix Arnold Burton's study of 18th-century buildings for his Georgian Revival design of this one.

Historical features he adorned his creation with include a façade-length brick stringcourse expressing the division of floors, the center entrance's scrolled broken pediment with pineapple, Gothic-arched dormer windows on a balustraded hipped roof, grouped outer-wall chimneys, and a multi-columned side porch.

This exemplar of elegant classical balance, where all the parts work together to form a pleasing whole, has finally received its academic due and rightful recognition. Howell House now presents itself as a dignified place for students to live and study, rather than to drink, joke and toke.

Quinby's quirk

Quinby House, formerly Psi Upsilon (Psi U), seemed made to order for the off-the-wall, funky, kinky, free-spirited types it attracted to its frat membership, who ran the gamut from hippy to punky to artsy to electric to bling. (They included the late New York artist Nina Jordan.) Psi U's erratic, dramatic explosion of gables, bay windows, porches, terraces and ells seemed to leave it dancing in the street, shouting "Party time!" to tempted frosh. The cool, hip in-crowd it housed also made it cliquish, as I sensed when no one there would talk to me during my Rush Week visit there. It was also too grimy, beer-rancid and graffiti-plastered for my palate.

But now that it has taken a new lease on life as the namesake of George "Pat" Hunnewell Quinby '23, Professor of English and Director of Dramatics at Bowdoin (its theater connection is very fitting for its artsy image), I'm told that a diverse, eclectic smorgasbord of personalities live there, putting on a panoply of intellectual, artistic, social and political events for the college community, as all College House dwellers make a pact with the college to do when they set up their residency there – hence the reputation of the College Houses as "the living rooms of Bowdoin." What a relief that they aren't just about beer, pot and parties anymore. I could have used such a sociocultural awakening when I was at Bowdoin.

Which Quinby House is entirely fit for. Built in 1903 from a Shingle Style design by John Calvin Stevens, it is as unbalanced as its fellow College Houses are balanced, as defined by its off-kilter front gable and the thrust of its side and rear gables and porches in varying lengths and directions...

...its rear protrusions taking the unusual form of a "K," inspired by Kappa, the Greek letter of the local Psi Upsilon chapter the house was built for. A green-painted Shingle Style skin wraps the entire composition, unifying its disparate parts and angles, nooks and crannies into a satisfying whole that provides the spatial ingredients necessary for a broad diversity of student personalities, campus activities, and study shelters.

Reed's repose

Reed House, formerly Chi Psi, is everything Quinby House isn't: Georgian, classical, collegiate, conservative, traditional, stately, symmetrical, restful. Which fit the conservative character of its fraternity – at least the one allied with the national headquarters. When I was at Bowdoin, Chi Psi split over the issue of admitting women as members, to the point where its co-ed faction declared itself a local frat – Alpha Chi Psi – and stayed in the house, banishing the all-male national allegiance (which included College Republicans) to a four-bed cluster in Bowdoin's Coles Tower.

Eventually the national HQ forced Alpha Chi Psi out of the house, and the national affiliate chapter renounced its recognition by Bowdoin in August 1982 in defiance of the college policy of women's equal participation in all frats. Its conversion to college housing certainly resolved that culture war.

Come to think of it, there was a similar split at TD, but in a different way: the unrecognized female members formed a sorority, Delta Theta Delta. Once women were admitted to Bowdoin in 1970, the debate over whether all fraternities should admit women as full members was a hot topic for years. The Bowdoin Orient campus weekly insisted, "Sexism has no place at Bowdoin," but some students believed fraternities should have an individual choice whether to remain a men's club. That was a price everyone who joined a frat paid: getting mired in its sometimes-nasty politics and social conflicts, which could easily be avoided by remaining an "indy," as I realized too late.

But that's in the past – though the past can't be ignored. Built in 1932 from a Georgian Revival design by H. Herbert Wheeler, Reed House is one of Bowdoin's most visually uniform College Houses, wrapped in a detail-challenged brick facade culminating in chimneys crowning its gambrel at each end.

Deviations from the uniformity, highlighting the house's essential components, include a pedimented center entrance, a diversity of window toppings (segmental brick arches on the first floor, straight brick lintels on the second, triangular pediments on the dormers), fan window-hoods on the sides under the chimneys, and modillioned cornices under the roof and on the entry pediment. Reed House is especially dignified by its setback from the street, providing it generous lawn and yard acreage for outdoor activities and giving it a sense of rural repose – which is most welcome come exam time.

Ladd's liberalism

Ladd House, formerly Zeta Psi (Zete), has undergone a radical transformation that is a blunt counterpoint to its conservative architecture and social history. When I was at Bowdoin, Zete (pronounced ZAYT, by the way) was one of the final holdouts in the college's all-male fraternity circle, its female affiliates being "token" members restricted from full participation. Which was a shame, because Zete had an earlier reputation as an all-inclusive co-ed frat, until its national HQ cracked down and forced out the females. (No wonder at least two of its full members defected to ARU. Another went in the opposite direction, for reasons hazy to me.)

But now Ladd House is a center of programs of a social movement under fire from the Trump administration: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). A 2023 renovation transitioned Ladd House from a sophomore residence and party venue to the headquarters of DEI-related campus support and advocacy programs: the Center for Multicultural Life (CML), for students of color; THRIVE, for first-generation, low-income and similar student populations; Sexuality, Women and Gender Center (SWAG), for female and LGBTQ+ students; the Rachel Lord Center of Religious and Spiritual Life, facilitating interfaith dialogue, spiritual practice, and student religious groups, with such resources as a Kosher and halai kitchen; and the Student Accessibility Office, coordinating accommodations and resources for students with disabilities. All of these programs are under the common umbrella of a multifaceted enclave of gathering spaces of diverse sizes and configurations for lectures, receptions, study groups, Bible studies, prayer groups and other social functions supporting all facets of student identities and fostering mutual understanding within diversity.

Quite a change for a house that has worn the look of collegiate conservatism since its construction in 1929 from a design by John P. Thomas, who laced it up with familiar Georgian Revival stone trappings: stringcourses defining story separations, keystoned window lintels, a roofline molding, a center-entrance pavilion with a Tuscan-columned portico, a broken scroll pediment and urn on the second-floor window, and a swag-adorned pediment crowning the composition.

This lodge replaced a more imaginative Shingle Style house from 1903 that would have been more appropriate for Ladd House's new function, for its diversity of gambrels, dormers, bay windows, porches and chimneys popping out hither and yon, yielding rooms, nooks and crannies of many sizes and dimensions.

Recalling the playful spirit of Psi U, this house was described in September 1903 by the Portland Evening Express as "of a shinglesque pattern, now rambling, quaint, and picturesque. The shingles are stained bronze green and the trimmings are white."

Bereft of its progressive design as it may be, Ladd House – named for Samuel A. Ladd Jr. '29, the first president of Zeta Psi's Lambda Chapter at Bowdoin, later the college's director of career counseling and placement – serves its new purpose well, kudos in part to the ells that pop out the back, offsetting the symmetry on the back and sides but supplying added space for the diversity of lecture, study and prayer rooms contained in the house's collegiate shell.

Burton-Little's bonanza

Burton-Little House, formerly Delta Kappa Epsilon (Deke), is on record as the first Bowdoin building designed and built specifically for a fraternity. It boasts a country-club appearance that seemed appropriate for the "preppy" reputation of its members. Deke was the first frat house I visited during my freshman-year Rush Week, and its preppy image, combined with the general friendliness of the members and the classical finesse of the architecture, immediately captivated me, so much so that I decided on the spot that I wanted to join, until ARU came along.

The Deke-ARU rivalry was always apparent. Throughout Rush Week we held house meetings in which we perused Bowdoin's booklet of pictures, names and hometowns of the latest crop of frosh to see whom we had talked to at our parties and whom we might want to bid to join ARU, and one student was rejected from consideration because she was "kind of Deke-ish," in one member's words. Another member complained whenever a freshman class seemed "rich, preppy" – implying, of course, that they'd be better off at Deke. But anyway...

Burton-Little House is Bowdoin's admissions office, and is entirely suited for the job by its collegiate presentability, making student wannabes feel special (or timid?) when they step onto the balustraded terrace and pass through the columned, pedimented portico into the detail-rich parlor.

Built in 1901 from a Colonial Revival design by Chapman & Frazer, the Delta Kappa Epsilon House was lauded pre-construction by the Bowdoin Orient: "The old colonial type of building with its simple lines seems to fit into the surroundings admirably. The grand old portal will give dignity to the front, but will not materially interfere with the interior rooms." In fact, the "grand old portal" seamlessly complemented the interior, where a bridal staircase introduced by columns with scrolled capitals, square corner pilasters, boxed ceiling beams, a classic fireplace, keystoned arches, a Palladian-windowed sitting room, an upholstered window seat, and woodwork of black walnut and California redwood are among the first-floor details Ouellet Construction of Brunswick carefully preserved in the 2000-2001 house-to-office renovation.

Burton-Little House was named for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harold Hitz Burton '09 and College Historian George T. Little, Class of 1877. Yet one wonders – in light of the reputation of Bowdoin's Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum (above) – if Deke should have been renamed Peary House, for its most eminent alumnus, Commander Robert E. Peary, who is credited with discovering the North Pole in April 1909 (left), as MacMillan House was named after TD's own Arctic explorer member.

In fact, on reaching his destination (according to legend; today there is widespread doubt that he reached the actual Pole), Peary paid tribute to his fraternity, as well as his country, as he reported in his 1910 book The North Pole:
We planted five flags at the top of the world. The first one was a silk American flag which Mrs. Peary gave me fifteen years ago...

A broad diagonal section of this ensign would now mark the farthest goal of earth – the place where I and my dusky companions stood.

It was also considered appropriate to raise the colors of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, in which I was initiated a member while an undergraduate student of Bowdoin College, the "World's Ensign of Liberty and Peace," with its red, white, and blue in a field of white, the Navy League flag, and the Red Cross flag.

Baxter's bravura

Baxter House, formerly Sigma Nu, was another early frat-to-flat conversion by the college. Built shortly after Delta Kappa Epsilon in 1901 from a design by the same architects, it essentially grew out of Deke. Its namesake, Hartley Cone Baxter, Class of 1878, likely chose Chapman & Frazer and their contractors, Smith & Rumery of Portland, to repeat their success with Deke by designing and building similar quarters for him, having been a member of Deke. In May 1901, the Brunswick Telegraph described "the fine new residence which H.C. Baxter is building on College Street" as "an exact duplicate in exterior and interior to the Delta Kappa Epsilon Chapter house."

However, Baxter deviated from Deke's design by embellishing his residence's center entrance with a round portico crowned and railed by classical balustrades, White House-style, and placing a Juliet balcony with scrolled brackets and a balustrade under the window over the entrance. Other "personal touches" included a chamfered left-hand bay window in lieu of Deke's squared bay, and dormers with triangular pediments instead of Deke's broken half-moon ones. He virtually replicated Deke's side porch and hipped roof.

After Baxter died in 1939 and his wife, Mary Lincoln Baxter, passed away in 1950, their house was acquired by the Sigma Nu fraternity after they moved out of what became Alpha Rho Upsilon. When Sigma Nu disbanded in 1970, their lodge was rechristened Baxter House as a student residence, for which its grandeur and breadth suited it perfectly.

I hope this little tour of Bowdoin College's former fraternity houses has given you an idea of how they never reached their full architectural potential until fraternities were abolished at Bowdoin (thank heavens) and they became the College Houses, a handsome panoply of variations on styles ranging from collegiate to colonial to creative. Their architectural distinction got lost in the frenzy of fraternity hijinks, be it beer-pong, pot parties, bong-water tosses, campus-wides, or just blowing off steam to blow off studies. Now they are bastions of social, intellectual and artistic campus activities, as their designs fit them for.

In Part II, I'll be reminiscing on my favorite academic buildings at Bowdoin. Stay tuned...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Remember the Refectory?

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 22:29:28 +0000

Franklin Park Refectory (1896, Hartwell & Richardson), c.1906. Photo by Thomas Warren Sears.

Franklin Park Refectory (1896, Hartwell & Richardson), c.1907.

As we celebrate the American Revolution Semiquincentennial and the golden anniversary of the American Revolution Bicentennial, I am observing a not-so-golden anniversary. Fifty years ago the Franklin Park Refectory, a Boston landmark that would be very useful today were it still with us, was laid waste and torn down.

Franklin Park Refectory (1896, Hartwell & Richardson), c.1907.

The best way to celebrate the history and heritage of our nation is to preserve, recycle and reuse its historic architecture as an educational tool for future generations and a tribute to the artisans who built distinguished social facilities to help foster a more civilly democratic society.

Franklin Park Refectory, courtesy of digitalcommonwealth.org.

So I thought I'd recall an architectural treasure — once of high social significance and utility to visitors to Franklin Park, its zoo and its golf course, kudos to its palatial presence in a location by the entries to those popular attractions – that fell victim to shifting socioeconomic demographics, benign neglect, and the wrecking ball.

Blueprints for the Franklin Park Refectory.

Frederick Law Olmsted conceived Refectory Hill as part of his 1886 General Plan for Franklin Park as a rural retreat offering a wide variety of amenities for people of all social classes within wilderness, rolling hills and paths, overlooks, a pond, and recreational fields. He envisioned the Refectory as an eating place where "refreshments [would] be served principally out of doors under a large pergola or vine clad trellis, upon a terrace formed in the manner of the Playstead Overlook. Horse Sheds on the east side. Extended sylvan prospects from the terrace." Designed in an Italian Renaissance Revival style by Hartwell & Richardson, the Refectory was dedicated with festive excitement on July 4, 1896 – timely with America's 220th anniversary – as an open, airy, breezy pavilion with a pergola, an arcade, corner towers with classical arches and balustrade balconies, private dining rooms, a second-story loggia, and a rooftop garden, bordered by a terrace and a classical balustrade overlooking a mountainous stone foundation. All those areas for eating, drinking and lounging offered heavenly bucolic vistas extending beyond the Arnold Arboretum to the Blue Hills, as an idyllic setting for the public to benefit from the restorative powers of food, libation and nature.

Franklin Park Refectory, c.1917.

Its hilltop grandeur, presenting it as a social mecca to a shrine of refreshment and renewal, was expressed by Sylvester Baxter in his Boston Park Guide: "While all the other park buildings are simple and picturesque in character, the Refectory is marked by an elegance of style in keeping with its site and purpose."

Franklin Park Refectory, renovated as a Boston Public Library branch.

By 1906, the Refectory proved a strain to maintain as a restaurant and café. So it became a branch of the Boston Public Library, for which its open-air first floor was closed off with an arcade of glass doors with arched transoms, making it an out-of-the-way place to read and study surrounded by the tranquility of nature.

Franklin Park Refectory as a Boston Public Library branch, side view.

Upon its closure as a library in the late 1920s, a Catholic charity sought its conversion to a day home for children with tuberculosis, that would enable them to take advantage of the healing powers of the fresh air and natural environs the building presented in abundance.

But neighbors objected to this proposal, afraid that it would turn the old building into something like a hospital (which, of course, didn't foreshadow the 1950s usurpation of Franklin Park's Heathfield by Lemuel Shattuck State Hospital, which remains there today).

It was reopened as an eatery by the Burke family in 1928. For 44 years it was the go-to concession stand for golfers, zoo crowds and kite-flyers, where Weitz Toasted Frankfurters were a specialty and Schlitz beers, Cracker Jacks, Mallomars, out-of-the-oven pizzas, ice cream, and more were served by dapper young men in white uniforms and aprons.

This variety of victuals extended the Refectory into a jovial social center where political powwows, gala get-togethers and children's birthday parties took place by the dozen, family dinners were enjoyed on umbrella-shaded terrace tables with breathtaking country views, and toboggans were rented out for winter coasts down Schoolmaster Hill.

Seniors have shared their happy memories of the Refectory on Facebook, including Tharreni Jessie Morton:

Yes, I think this is maybe the building I have been thinking of off and on that we used to go to – it had a little lunch counter where you could get maybe a hotdog and a drink... and [an] old stereopticon picture machine, things that you looked at little scenes from – old Victorian stuff – and it was still pretty much just as it had been in the past – and this was in my teen years in [the] early-mid-sixties.

Franklin Park Refectory after closing, mid-1970s.

The rapidly changing social demographics, urban renewal, and mounting fear of crime that led to the "white flight" from Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and other neighborhoods abutting Franklin Park forced the closing of the refectory in 1972, which plunged this noble classical temple into decay and long-term neglect. A blog visitor shared his memory of this in 2008:

I remember pulling open the large metal door on the abandoned, boarded-up Refectory back in 1974 as a 10 year old to look inside. It was cavernous. And all I could think was, "Wow, somebody should fix this place up!" That experience sparked a love for abandoned old buildings with potential that has stayed with me ever since.

Photo by Georgfotoart.

My father's scrutiny of the near-shambles Refectory sparked the same for me – especially when, in April 1976, he was notified that it was being razed, no thanks to a decree from then Commissioner of Parks and Recreation Anthony Forgione that it had to be torn down "right away." My father dashed out to the site, where he was interviewed by a major news outlet about the demolition, and an eighth-grade classmate told me she had seen my father on television.

He even reported to us that one of the wrecking crew had told him, "It's a shame that they should tear something like this down," and that about 12 mature trees were cut down in the process – as if the city had a parking lot for the golf course and the zoo in mind for the site. My father salvaged an ornate plaster bracket from the rubble, which he displayed in our garden and let the elements erode over time, as sort of a memorial to the ruination of the Refectory.

Fast-forward fifty years: What's Refectory Hill like today? Sure enough, it's another fulfillment of the prophecy Joni Mitchell made in her song, "Big Yellow Taxi":

Don't it always
seem to go

That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?

They paved paradise,

Put up a parking lot.

Trillium beer garden, Fenway (opened March 2013). Photo by Alex Zokan.

Which is a shame, considering today's popularity of beer gardens such as the Trillium in the Fenway. Today there would certainly be a market for a restored Franklin Park Refectory as a beer garden attracting the crowds that flock to the Franklin Park Zoo, the William Devine Golf Course, the annual Kite Festival, and White Stadium once it's rebuilt.

Just as Frederick Law Olmsted had predicted when he first envisioned the Franklin Park Refectory.

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You must remember this...

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:18:17 +0000

Coulton Building (c.1912). Courtesy of Henry Osteen, Boston Mass. Vintage, Facebook.

...but I don't blame you if you don't – especially given the in-your-face eyeful that replaced it (more on that later). The Coulton Building once stood at a prominent corner of Boylston and Berkeley streets in Boston's Back Bay, and was one of the city's many overlooked and underappreciated architectural gems that nobody has remembered since they were gone.

Except for three people who are not with us today (speaking of gone): architectural historian Donlyn Lyndon, the fictional private eye Spenser of the late Robert B. Parker's crime novels and the TV series Spenser: For Hire, and my father, architect and historian Leslie Larson.

YMCA (1882, Sturgis & Brigham), A Stranger's Guide to Boston and its Suburbs (1883).

The Coulton Building was itself a replacement for quite an eyeful: a majestic YMCA, built in 1882 from a design by Sturgis & Brigham. This High Victorian Gothic red brick hybrid of Queen Anne, Ruskinian Gothic and Dutch Gable styles anchored its corner with a generous helping of friendly elegance inviting people of all ages and backgrounds to come in and get fit, who were no doubt attracted by its terra cotta ornament, arched windows, and cylindrical corner turret...

YMCA (1882, Sturgis & Brigham), courtesy of Henry Osteen, Facebook.

...not to mention its smorgasbord of community offerings. In addition to the most advanced athletic facilities, it offered lodging, a library, and lecture halls. Sadly, this bastion of Back Bay grandeur was destroyed by fire in 1910, forcing the YMCA to relocate to its present larger facility on Huntington Avenue. But this building's destruction paved the way for one of the neighborhood's most creative, ahead-of-its-time structures.

Photo by Moulton-Erickson Photograph Co., courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

The completion of the Coulton Building around 1912 certainly brought fresh character to this prominent Back Bay intersection, helping to transition Boylston Street and most of its cross streets from a largely residential and cultural district, like the one extending to Commonwealth Avenue and the Charles River, to one of Boston's main commercial boulevards. It was Boston's new downtown, essentially.

Coulton Building (c.1912). Photo courtesy of Heidi Adams on Facebook.

And what a difference the new building made! Gone were the YMCA's Jacobethan windows and stepped gables in favor of innovative bay windows that stretched the Back Bay's iconic chamfered bays to new dimensions of light and space, while quadrupling the corner turret, to allow all levels to take advantage of the plethora of corner light and vistas that were foreshadowing the modern office building.

Coulton Building, courtesy of MIT Digital Collections.

In The City Observed: Boston, Donlyn Lyndon wrote that the Coulton Building "may be my favorite building in Boston, an astonishing combination of straightforward building construction and sheer willful iconoclasm... As you look at the building you look directly into the offices, with various forms of chairs, bicycles, plants and drapery juxtaposed against the architectural patterning." This was a good opportunity for the building's tenants to use their bay picture windows to showcase their businesses more prominently on the street, drawing upon an aesthetic pioneered by Chicago School of Architecture office buildings such as Burnham & Root's Reliance Building (1890-1895), Holabird & Roche's Monadnock Building (1891-1893) and Chicago Savings Bank Building (1904-1905), and Adler & Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange (1894, demolished 1972). This was a harbinger of modernism's dissolution of the barrier between inside and outside through the membranes of window walls.

The Coulton was also perfectly timed with the construction of the Back Bay subway extension (today's MBTA Green Line) from 1913-1914, which brought a flurry of commuters to and from Boston's new downtown, hence to the light and luxury of its new Chicago-windowed offices and back home to Boston's streetcar suburbs.

The Coulton's bay windows may also have been inspired by its Beaux-Arts neighbor across the street, the Berkeley (1905, Codman & Despradelle), which has similar windows in its tall arched openings. The Berkeley was likely the location of Spenser's office, as Parker's novel Early Autumn suggests:

I moved down Boylston Street to the corner of Berkeley, second floor. I was half a block from Brooks Brothers and right over a bank... To the right across Boylston I could see Bonwit Teller. To the left Police Headquarters. In Bonwit's windows there were mannequins wearing tight leather clothes and chains. Police headquarters leaned more to Dacron. In the window bay of the advertising agency across the street a young black-haired woman in high-waisted gray trousers leaned over a drawing board. Her back was toward the window. "My compliments to your tailor," I said out loud. My voice sounded odd in the empty room. The black-haired woman went away and I sat at my desk...

Bonwit Teller (now Restoration Hardware), courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

Spenser was likely ogling her through a revealing bay window of the Coulton right across from his office as he kept his eagle-eyes on the city from his panoramic perch, waiting for new clients and giving the streets the once-over for auguries of criminal activity. He also had a handsome view of Bonwit Teller (right) catercorner to him, possibly another model for the Coulton's shop-window approach to architecture. (Now the RH Boston Gallery, this building was built in 1863-1864 from a French Academic / Neoclassical design by William Gibbons Preston as the Museum of Natural History, the precursor to Boston's Museum of Science.)

Woodbury Building (1898-99), 443-445 Boylston St.

In fact, the Coulton was the fourth cornerstone in a four-corner historical merry-go-round that distinguished the Boylston-Berkeley crossroads as a four-way gateway to different parts of the city. Catercorner to it was the Woodbury Building, built in 1898-99 by Woodbury & Leighton, builders of the Boston Public Library. The Woodbury is notable for its razor-thin footprint and its pressed-metal bay windows, another possible inspiration for the Coulton for their light- and space-giving qualities.

For the Coulton's historically inspired and futuristically foresighted design, my father lobbied to have it preserved. But the nine-member Boston Landmarks Commission's rejection of its landmark designation by a tie vote, with one abstention due to a conflict of interest, sealed its fate. So in 1989 it gave way for 222 Berkeley, a haphazardly massed phantasmagoria of historical allusions cooked up by Robert A.M. Stern as a bedfellow of 500 Boylston, Philip Johnson's Italianate extravaganza next door. Now 222 Berkeley commands (and demands) our undivided attention with virtually every Bostonian stylistic trick in the pattern-book: a grand arched entrance ceremonially flanked by Ionic column pairs, a brass mini-dome referencing the State House, bay windows and a corner oriel clearly taking cues from the building's predecessor, a Grecian temple front for its main entrance, a crown of festoons, and brick, brick, brick. This historical hodgepodge takes all our notice away from the three historic corners it competes with, doing grave injustice to the artful restraint, careful composition, and artistic coherence of historic Back Bay architecture in the name of the grotesque showmanship of the postmodern era. Which both the Coulton Building and the YMCA were careful to avoid by focusing on balanced composition, structural practicality, and fenestral finesse, now both long forgotten as time goes by.

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The desecration of St. Paul's

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 21:51:36 +0000

Archival image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

As a choirboy at Boston's Cathedral Church of St. Paul in the 1970s, I was always vexed and perplexed by the uncarved, uneven stone blocks in the church's crowning pediment as I faced the façade on my way to weekly rehearsals and Sunday morning services. Compromising the Greek Revival grace and refinement of the old stone temple front – which was built of light Quincy granite hauled from the Quincy quarries on America's first railroad and Ionic columns of brown sandstone quarried from Acquia Creek in Stafford County, Virginia – the pediment seemed to hunger for something to fill that gap, to climax the cathedral with a sublime signature that sanctified its patron saint in an artistic and proper Bostonian way.

In fact, the church's original 1819 Greek Revival design by Alexander Parris (of Quincy Market fame) and Solomon Willard (of Bunker Hill Monument fame) had called for a detailed bas-relief of St. Paul preaching before King Agrippa II to be carved into the crowning pediment.

St. Paul Before Agrippa and Bernice by David Martin (1639-1721).

It would have resembled the pediment bas-relief above, on St. Paul's Cathedral in London, had it been executed, and would have likely been modeled on various artistic interpretations of Paul's homily to Agrippa, Bernice and Roman governor Festus on his Christian conversion and the realization of Old Testament prophecies of Jesus Christ's suffering, death and resurrection, as recorded in Acts 26 in the New Testament. This carving would have been just the artistic finishing touch of Bostonian academic erudition this fine work of architecture called for. Alas, a shortage of funds made it not to be.

Photo by Beyond My Ken, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Well, the pediment was finally filled after two centuries. Only this nautilus whimsy backed in shocking blue isn't what I had in mind. True, this sculpture – "A Ship of Pearl" by Donald Lipski – was intended as a universal metaphor for spiritual evolution based on Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem The Chambered Nautilus, promoting the Cathedral as a "House of Prayer for All People" (Isaiah 56:7) rather than an Episcopalian coterie.

St. Paul's Cathedral at night. Photo by Father Tim.

But the neon of the nautilus clashes violently with the historic architecture and cheapens its public effect, especially at night (right), much in the vein of that image of mass communication (and miscommunication) in Simon & Garfunkel's song: "And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made, and the sign flashed out its warning..." And it is a warning about what we're in for when we enter.

Former interior, Cathedral Church of St. Paul. Photo by Daderot.

No, not this. This was the cathedral before its makeover. In proper Episcopalian form, rows of wooden pews faced the half-domed choir chancel (renovated by Ralph Adams Cram in 1912), physically reinforcing the sanctity of its ministers and bishops over its parishioners, and providing the choir and organist with a good acoustical channel to the congregation.

St. Paul's Cathedral before its renovation. Photo courtesy of Pinterest.

And what a coherent composition it made! The mahogany rails of the original pews (though their doors had been removed and their floors raised before I joined the choir) lent a touch of old-time New England, and blended smoothly with the chancel's carved reredos, choir benches and wainscoting that were part of Cram's sensitive remodel.

Look at it now: Original pews ripped out, replaced with freely placed chairs. Floor tackily redone with a zany labyrinth design in line with the funk of the nautilus. Altar relocated to the center. Skylights punched into the old coffers. Original windows replaced with those thermal-paned tack-ons with fake muntins, now half closed off.

Understandably, the church wanted a more flexible, accessible meetinghouse-styled sanctuary with more democratically arranged seating in circles (for which the labyrinth provides a handy floor plan) that enabled the minister to communicate equally to all parishioners of all races, colors, genders and abilities, and "to better house a full range of ministries," as the renovation's designers, Context Architecture, put it. But this took away the Greek Revival / Classical Revival coherence of Parris's and Cram's historical visions, reducing the interior to a generic parish hall furbelowed with the frippery of historical chintz.

Photo courtesy of the Organ Historical Society.

Even the magnificent Aeolian-Skinner loft organ that my choir director, Thomas Murray, loved to play – and I still remember the rumbles, swells and echoes of its diapasons in his stellar performance of Eugène Gigout's Grand Choeur Dialogué – was dismantled, put in storage, and listed for sale through the Organ Clearing House, to make way for...

...a handicapped-acessible elevator. Which is also understandable, given the demands of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and many churches' efforts to accommodate people of varying physical capacities. But history was lost in the process, and the church no longer exhibits its historical evolution of fine craftsmanship through the ages.

The chancel, too, broke the molds of history to extend outward into the nave to be closer to the worshippers, bidding farewell to the minister/congregation dichotomy of New England Anglican and Episcopal churches from King's Chapel to Old North to St. Paul's. The checkerboard floor looks as tacked on as the labyrinthine seating plot.

Photo courtesy of the Organ Historical Society.

Now St. Paul's interior yields a very different effect for me from when I paraded with my fellow choirboys up the central aisle to the choir chancel, and back toward the narthex at the end of the service, while singing "God of Our Fathers" to the organ's brassy fanfare, "Onward, Christian Soldiers," and other majestic hymns every Sunday morning, and hearing the organ's soft bell-chimes solemnly close the service before Mr. Murray's postlude performance of Charles-Marie Widor's Toccata rip-roared away.

At night, St. Paul's Cathedral seems to blend more with the neon shop signs and late-night office lights than with the rest of Boston's historic architecture, on account of the neon nautilus glitz of what filled its pediment – which, indeed, comes across more like advertising than artistic homage to a saint. This is a vulgar desecration of New England's first Greek Revival church, in the name of no-more-kings social progress. I love the causes, but not the context.

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There goes the neighborhood

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:42:43 +0000

How dramatically a change of scenery can alter the character of its foreground. Such is the fate of this Georgian Revival building in Watertown, Mass., built in the 1920s as the office of masonry contractor T. Stuart & Son, handily backdropped by lowly stone/brick yards, until...

...they gave way to high-end residential development that totally changes the building's visual context, most notably by giving it the high-end luxury condos and apartments it had happily lived without for a century, keeping the town affordable, until now. There goes the neighborhood!

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Power and pallor in presidential libraries and museums — Part IV

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:30:27 +0000

This is a continuation of a series of posts assessing the architecture of U.S. Presidents' libraries and museums. Part I covers those of John Adams to Rutherford Hayes; Part II, William McKinley to Herbert Hoover; Part III, Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy. This is Part IV.

Joyless Johnson

Too bad Kennedy's VP and successor didn't get an architectural/archival tribute as creatively cutting-edge as that of his prez. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft and R. Max Brooks of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, even lacks the high-tech innovation of Bunshaft's Lever House in New York (1952).

Photo by Beyond My Ken, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lever's marked contrast of vertical and horizontal elements (right) does resurface slightly in LBJ's libes (above), albeit haphazardly. Here it tries to be both at once, which cancels out both its latitudinal and longitudinal forces to render it static and nondescript, as if Bunshaft didn't know what to make of Johnson's presidency. And no wonder: Johnson's beneficent Medicare, Medicaid, Great Society and Civil Rights initiatives were badly balanced by his Vietnam War escalation, breaching his promise never to "send our boys to fight Asian wars" and disgracing him into declining a second term. Lever's well-balanced upward and outward thrusts articulate future technological and corporate growth and expansion with lofty optimism, while the library goes nowhere, leaden with the gloom that ended LBJ's irresolute presidency...

Photo by Wally Gobetz, courtesy of Flickr.com

...as well as JFK's joyfully optimistic one, with the assassin's bullet that shot Johnson into power — and how. In On the Rise, Paul Goldberger wrote that the 1971 LBJ Library "suggested a pompous presidency; it may or may not have been so, but the mausoleum-like architecture makes it hard to believe that Mr. Johnson was anything but an emperor."

Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archives

The awkward placement of the horizontal element on top of the building does suggest an imperial crown — or the swelled head that made LBJ ruthlessly ambitious, rising from Senate Majority Leader to Vice President to President to Vietnam Warrior. This makes the building top- heavy, not lithely levitating like Lever House or the JFK Library.

More like an airport control tower awaiting Lyndy's landing on Air Force One. The paved plaza certainly has a runway routineness, which is not helped by the bureaucratic impersonality of the University of Texas at Austin's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs running beside it.

Offsetting the austerity of the campus are colorful perennials, shady trees, lush greenspace, and especially the single-jet fountain, which hauntingly evokes the aura of the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame at JFK's Arlington National Cemetery gravesite when lit up at night.

Photo by Zereshk, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The library's Great Hall feels imperial indeed — soaring and reaching in all directions, coffered for an echoic effect, carved with a gargantuan presidential seal, and constructed with a ceremonial staircase rising regally toward a window-wall revealing the four-level presidential archive stacks.

Trying to expand as much as possible within the confines of its concrete shell, the hall conveys Johnson's great power- grab and mountain-climb up the political ladder — as well as his ultimate demise.

For its barren walls, empty coffers and underutilized space sour with the vapidity of vanity, the all-for-nothing aura of a president's fall from greatness, and his failure to carry Kennedy's vision to full fruition.

Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library and Museum.

Nor are the archives particularly appealing. Resembling cell-block rows instead of library stacks, they contradict the space's openness with a jail's barred enclosure, making one wonder why they are displayed just so. To invite us to learn more about an underappreci- ated man? To suggest a punishment due him for overextension of power?

Photo by Wally Gobetz, courtesy of Flickr.com

LBJ's four-door Lincoln limousine does lend credence to Goldberger's speculation of a pompous presidency (though Johnson didn't order it until after leaving office). It also casts him as a "limousine liberal," a term coined soon after Lyndon left office in 1969 when Democratic New York mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino described his Republican opponent, John Lindsay, as such. (Lindsay won, then switched parties.)

Photo by Found5dollar, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library and Museum.

Of course, no presidential museum is complete without a precise, down-to-the-details replica of the Oval Office as it looked when that museum's namesake occupied it – this one complete with his presidential desk, three-TV console enabling him to keep track of CBS, NBC and ABC broadcasts simultaneously, period phones and teletype machines, personal books and mementos, and a portrait of FDR that LBJ looked to for inspiration. At least this space's classical style and presidential-suite luxury are a temporary relief from the white-bread blandness of the building itself.

Photo by Ajay Suresh, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Yes, as we leave the LBJ library and museum, we can't help noticing its plainness on the plain it stands on. Its uniform cream-travertine skin, relieved from total blah by cornices of modillions formed by the coffered ceiling structure, doesn't exactly make us want to go back there, and seems to memorialize Lyndon Johnson as an imperial but nondescript president who was too full of contradictions, missteps, and deviations from his Great Society idealism for us to get a proper historical reading on him – hence the lack of architectural reading we get on his library/museum.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

When worlds collide...and collaborate

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:48:38 +0000

This is one of my favorite street-corners in Boston – where mid-rises and high-rises of disparate historical periods, architectural styles, building materials, and namesake functions competing for equal sky-time on the skyline somehow manage to harmonize in a pleasing, coherent cohabitation of complementary contrast.

Here they are, from top left to bottom right:

The Boston Consolidated Gas Company Building, a "twin tower" built in 1927 from a Classical Revival / Renaissance Revival design by Parker, Thomas & Rice (who included J. Harleston Parker, the namesake of the Boston Society for Architecture's Harleston Parker Medal) for the 1903 consolidation of multiple local gas companies, including the city's first and only coal-gas company for 30 years prior, The Boston Gas Light Company, founded in 1823. A big gas conglomerate required a big building, and a visually distinctive one at that: it follows Classicism's base, shaft and capital hierarchy to the letter and is clad in carved and dressed limestone, with a first-floor arcade and arched top-floor windows. And what better place to locate it than on the fringes of one of the company's main beneficiaries, the Back Bay (note that neighborhood's gaslamps). The building was converted to luxury apartments in 2014.

Photo by Thomas Kelley.

The Castle at Park Plaza, formerly the Armory of the First Corps of Cadets, was built of rocky granite from 1891 to 1897 from a Richardsonian Romanesque / Medieval Revival design by William Gibbons Preston as an ammunition storage and drill-hall facility for the First Corps of Cadets of Massachusetts, founded in 1741 and renowned for graduating officers for regiments ranging from the Revolutionary War through World War II. It was structurally engineered to withstand mob violence, owing to the political and civil unrest going on then. After various uses – including UMass Boston's first library, a banquet facility for the Boston Park Plaza Hotel (see below), and a Smith & Wollensky Steakhouse – it is now an event venue known as the Saunders Castle & the Tower. Public spectacle events it has hosted in its vast drill hall include Discovering King Tut's Tomb, Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, The Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks, and Immersive Monet & the Impressionists.

The Liberty Mutual Tower, built from 2011 to 2013 from a design by CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares Inc., may be Boston's major revival of the turn-of-the-century masonry skyscraper style that produced the likes of New York's Flatiron Building and Times Tower (sadly shorn of its Renaissance Revival granite/terracotta façade, and now masked in bland marble and LED advertising) at very narrow street intersections, which molded them into acute triangles. This tower is clad in Indiana limestone mounted on architectural precast concrete, with some granite used on the lower podium to blend with historic Back Bay buildings. The many awards it won (and deserved) include the Boston Preservation Alliance's 2014 Preservation Achievement Award. So if you're sick of those goofy "Liberty, Liberty, Liberty" ads on TV, the Internet or your car radio, have a look at the tower to see how tasteful the company can be when it wants to.

Photo by RhythmicQuietude.

The John Hancock Tower, aka 200 Clarendon Street, is another geometric oddity that fostered a radical transformation of the Boston skyline – for better or for worse – when built from 1968 to 1976 a from a design by the late Harry Cobb of I.M. Pei & Partners.

Inspired by a skyscraper concept proposed by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe in 1922, the Hancock broke every Boston architecture rule in the book for its minimalist mirror-glass International Style, its twisted parallelogram shape, its accurate reflections of cloud formations, its status as New England's tallest building (a record it still holds), and especially its reputation as the "Plywood Ranch" or "Plywood Palace" because many of its windows popped out due to expansion and contraction of air between each window's inner and outer glass panels, necessitating their boarding-up until all 10,344 panes could be replaced with single-paned, heat-treated panels, which have held firm ever since.

To make matters worse, the tower swayed in high winds, giving occupants motion sickness. This forced Cobb to send for Swiss engineer Bruno Thurlimann to install a tuned mass damper near the top to counteract the swaying and to add 1,500 tons of diagonal steel bracing to the building, following the model set by the tower's precursor, the John Hancock Center in Chicago (1969).

At first reviled by many as a blemish on the Boston skyline, the Hancock Tower is now one of the city's most recognizable and revered icons, easily spotted miles away from multiple directions, and an ever-popular Facebook/Instagram photo-op subject.

Photo by Kenneth Grant.
The Old John Hancock Building, aka The Berkeley Building, is the John Hancock Tower's most immediate ancestor. Built in 1947 from a design by Cram & Ferguson, this Ohio sandstone edifice brought the streamlined Art Deco style of the Empire State Building into Boston, at the same time blessing it with the iconic weather beacon that is still used today as a predictor of the elements:

Steady blue, clear view.

Flashing blue, clouds due.

Steady red, rain ahead.

Flashing red, snow instead.

(It also flashes red when a Red Sox game is rained out.) I had the privilege of singing in its beautiful John Hancock Hall with the Bretton Woods Boy Singers to close our (final) summer concert season with one last hurrah.

10 St. James Avenue, though hard to see in the top photo, is significant for its transitional style, bridging the generation gap among the Miesian modernism of the John Hancock Tower, the masonry revivalism of the Liberty Mutual Tower, and the limestone antiquity of their century-old neighbors. Built in 2000 from an eclectic design by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, this 20-story office building alternates a blend of limestone and buff-colored brick with reflective mirror glass, blending nicely with all neighbors from all eras, and referencing the Berkeley Building's spire with a vertical antenna of its own. Its glass galleria unites it with the Paine Furniture Building next door and provides a covered but sunny passage to Stuart Street, with cafe seating that lets you stop and rest in safety from any kind of weather Berkeley's beacon predicts.

Photo by James Woodward.
The Paine Furniture Building, aka 75 Arlington Street, was built in 1914 in a Classical Revival design by Densmore & LeClear as showrooms, offices and manufacturing facilities for the Paine Furniture Company, which explains its large, light-giving Chicago windows and tall, wide entries and display windows. Structured in steel and faced in limestone with carved brackets, capitals, modillions, festoons and a balustrade, it is notable for its cropped corner entrance, easing its accessibility from both crossroads. I had the privilege of studying interior design when Suffolk University's New England School of Art & Design was housed there, and its large windows and cylindrical load-bearing columns comprised the perfect studio ambiance for such a pursuit.

Photo by Mark N. Belanger.
The Hilton Boston Park Plaza, originally The Hotel Statler Boston, is another triangular cropped-corner power-presence on this corner. Built in 1927 by hotelier Ellsworth M. Statler from a Classical Beaux-Arts design by the New York firm of George B. Post and Sons, it furthered the wave of Roaring '20s New York glitz into Boston, touting it proudly in every festooned arch, crystal chandelier, ceiling medallion, gilded balcony, and white-glove valet throughout its city-within-a-city. Notable guests included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Garland.

Photo by Brooks Payne.
Statler Park was a gift to Boston from Ellsworth M. Statler in 1927 in exchange for Mayor James Michael Curley's approval of the hotel's construction at the desired height. Statler later donated The Fountain Figure, the bronze statue atop the park's central fountain, sculpted by Ulysses Ricci around 1912 (below).

The Motor Mart Garage, built concurrently with the Hotel Statler Boston from a Stripped Classical / Art Deco design by Ralph Harrington Doane, it was the world's largest garage upon its opening in 1927, timely with the growing prevalence of the automobile in Park Square, and certainly made to order for the Statler's influx of hotel guests, especially with its innovative double-ramp circulatory system for 2,000 cars. Publicized as "more than a place to park your car," the garage also offered a car wash, an auto body shop, and a pumping station. The angel-winged circular shields along its cornice trumpeted the quality of service offered therein. It received the Harleston Parker Medal as Boston's "finest new building of 1927."

Photo by Kevin Stewart.

This corner of Boston is symbolic of the city's growth from an aggregate of low-rise villages and narrow streets to an upwardly mobile metropolis out to compete with New York for livability and commerce, those ambitions expressed in the diverse styles and materials of their eras, but all sharing the common attribute of being on the up and up in architecture. But so as not to become too cavernous as they soared to new heights, they were careful to reserve space for one of Boston's first pocket parks, for the new wave of office workers and hotel guests to enjoy their lunch.

Photo by Luis Torres.

This enclave attracts me because I'm a native New Yorker, and when my family relocated to Boston I couldn't help but count its New York-styled buildings as my favorites. Among them were the Old John Hancock Building, the Hotel Statler Boston, the Armory (which brought back memories of New York's Seventh Regiment Armory, where I had witnessed my neighbor Andrew advance in the ranks of his Knickerbocker Greys military club), and perhaps the only example of Midcentury Modern on historic Beacon Hill. This hodgepodge of high-rises and mid-rises, stone and steel, glass and glitz, certainly brings the Big Apple home to the Hub, in a way that is uniquely Bostonian.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

'Private eyes, they're watching you...'

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 01:53:45 +0000

Mayor's Suite/City Council Chamber windows, Boston City Hall (1969, Kallmann-McKinnell-Knowles). Photo: Epicgenius.

Boston City Hall (1969, Kallmann-McKinnell-Knowles). Photo by Daderot.

...and they could indeed see your every move, if someone does happen to be watching you from the privacy of whatever room lurks behind those eyelike twin windows, while you transfix your eyes onto them in awe at their in-your-face stare at your lowly self.

City Council Chamber, Boston City Hall, in 1981. Photo by Bill Lebovich.

That classic Hall & Oates song from 1981 flashed in my mind as I noticed an online image of the two watchful windows of the City Council Chamber (left) in Boston's City Hall, which were clearly designed to enable city councilors to keep vigil on the city they're leading, reassure us that they're watching over us like angels, or remind us that "Big Brother is watching you," in George Orwell's words of warning from 1984.

Victorian blast furnace, Shropshire, UK. Photo by David Humphreys.

That is but one example of the "two eyes" effect in worldwide architecture, as designers integrated the semblance of faces or ogling eyeballs into their buildings, whether deliberately or accidentally. They were either calculated attention-getters as business pitches for the structures, or simply sources of sunlight that just happened to have facial features. This Victorian blast furnace (right) was probably not meant to be facially comical, but we can't help seeing its elongated windows as eyes, its circular vent as a nose, its arched entry as a mouth, its chimney as a raised arm, and its gabled roof as a peaked hat.

Photo courtesy of Build Green New Homes.

In fact, I was taught to recognize eyes and faces in houses as early as third grade, courtesy of the following poem:

HOUSES

by Aileen Fisher

Houses are faces

(haven't you found?)

with their hats in the air

and their necks in the ground.

Windows are noses,

windows are eyes,

and doors are the mouths

of a suitable size.

And the porch – or the place

where porches begin –

is just like a mustache

shading the chin.

One of greater Boston's most instantly recognizable "faces" is the rounded, oddly detailed front entrance façade of the famous Harvard Lampoon Castle in Cambridge. Built in 1909 from a composite design of Dutch Gable, Flemish Renaissance, Elizabethan, Jacobethan and English Medieval styles by Edmund March Wheelwright (who embellished it with real imported 17th-century Delft tiles, Belgian leaded windows and a genuine Elizabethan mantelpiece), this oddball mashup of sometimes incongruous architectural details bespeaks the humor of its interior publication with a comical face, comprising a crowned bowler hat, porthole eyes with lozenge frames, a cast-iron lantern nose, a lintel-lipped (or mustached) vertical window mouth, a front door like a sideways bowtie, a front-stoop beard, and a cylindrical brick façade suggesting the contours of a ruddy, sunburned or drunkenly flushed human face.

The façade seems to have the bug-eyed stare of someone shocked or startled in a comedy sketch, in line with the humorous slant of the stomping grounds for such pioneering humorists as Robert Benchley, Christopher Cerf, Fred Gwynne, B.J. Novak, and Conan O'Brien.

Harvard Lampoon Castle (1909, Edmund March Wheelwright), Cambridge, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Google Maps.

"Shocked" castle, Iceland. Photo by Ingvild Sommer.

"Shocked" stone house, Gordes, Provence, France. Photo by Celli07.

Similarly "shocked" and "startled" faces abound the world around.

On this Icelandic castle (above), half-moon transoms, a mouth-like arched window, and "hands up" crenellations create the castle's "shock value."

Likewise, on this stone house (left) in Gordes, Provence, France, the leaded vertical window-eyes, the off-center chimney nose, and the agape elongated window-opening mouth create a shocked expression on that façade, with the gable on the lower section adding the comical effect of a "mustache."

"Shocked" or "glum" stone ruin, Skiathos, Greece.

"Surprised" stone house, Cyprus. Photo by Nikta Nikta.

In this stone ruin in Skiathos, Greece (above), over centuries the elements appear to have carved a shocked or glum expression out of the remains of its arched window "eyebrowed" eyes and its agape Moorish-arched doorway mouth. The dome makes a good bald head.

This stone castle in Cyprus (right) is given a "surprised" expression by its curving plaster "eyebrow" lintels and wide-open squarish grilled "eyes," its arrowslit "nose," and its grilled window "mouth" surrounded by the "lips" of a black frame and a "chin" sill.

The white house in Heidelberg, Germany (below) has a "shocked" or "sad" expression, depending on which of its window pairs you see as "eyes." The shuttered larger casement windows with the agape archway "mouth" have a look of shock, whereas the small oval windows with the arch's "pout" seem sadder.

"Shocked" or "Sad" house, Heidelberg, Germany. Photo by Luftschiffhafen.

Cartoon-face shop, Kyoto, Japan.
Photo by Didier Zylberyng.

Scary robot-faced diner, Tokyo, Japan.
Photo by Steven L. Johnson.

Of course, some commercial buildings are deliberately built with "faces" calculated to grab your attention and attract your business to the enterprises within, such as these Japanese oddities: at left, a Kyoto clothing shop with bulging eye-windows, a sharp ventilator nose (with nostrils!) and a wide-mouthed entry; at right, a Chikara Meshi Tokyo diner with robotically staring square eyes (complete with eyeballs!), a bridged nose that appears to be an extension of a broken "hat" pediment, a toothed mouth display/message window, and a a sign and entrance in the form of a multicolored beard.

Happy house, Belarus. Photo by Tumar.

Other buildings put on a happy face — with decoration, of course, since it's harder to eke a smile than a shocked, sad or sober visage out of ordinary exterior details. An example is this charmer from Belarus, with square windows and a cosmetic smile, as if it's watching you with the intent of brightening your day as you pass by.

Smiley-face turret, Switzerland. Photo by Djenev.

Here's another smiley, this time in Switzerland: a pop-out turret with all the ingredients of a quick cheerer-upper: wide-open oval lookout windows, arched panels for raised eyebrows, acorn-like reliefs and a meniscus-like line for a smiling mouth, and a polygonal roof for a hat. How optimistic can a building get?

"Big Teeth" house, location unknown. Photo by Hydebrink.

Yes, a few houses can become accidentally happy, such as this one from parts unknown. Here, two curtained square window "eyes" and a Belgian stone-bordered planter "mouth" planted with large shrubbery "teeth" make up a rather jovial welcome home or see-you-soon.

Cuibul de Lemn hotel, Râşnov, Romania, courtesy of Google Earth.

Buildings can be sleepy, too, as the Cuibul de Lemn hotel in Râşnov, Romania, shows. No doubt a promotion of the hotel as a quiet place to get some shut-eye, it makes the most of its "closing eyebrow" windows, "nose" ventilator, and flat closed "mouth" below to visually communicate its message. Furthermore, it is a variation on...

The Eyes of Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania.

...the Eyes of Sibiu (Ochii Sibiului), a Romanian tourist attraction of houses with eyebrow dormers in Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania. Originating from the 15th century as an element of Baroque architecture, the dormers give the impression of the half-shut eyes associated with the upstairs sleeping quarters behind them.

The Eyes of Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania.

According to popular legend, the Eyes of Sibiu were intended to scare the general public into thinking they were being watched from above – like true "private eyes" – though in reality these eyebrow dormers were designed as a ventilation system for attics. And with good reason: who would want to sleep in a stuffy attic or feel faint after poking around up there?

Trödel & Antik antique shop, Friedrich-Wieck-Straße, Dresden, Germany.

Especially if the attic belongs to an antique shop, like Trödel & Antik in Dresden, Germany, which certainly needs its eyebrow dormers to ventilate the fragile inventory stored up there. And these "Eyes of Sibiu" do have a way of staring you right in the face, enticing you inward to browse the collection.

Photo courtesy of Brick & Batten, Atlanta, Georgia.

Hospice de Beaune, France.

Here are a couple of eyefuls: a house showing its "shocked" reaction with arched dormers for "eyes," an arrowslit window "nose" and a wide window "mouth" (above); and L'Hospice de Beaune, France, forming eyes and nose (with nostrils) from pointed dormers and mouth from the window opening below the "nose" (right).

Now, see if you can identify the location (or at least the type of house) the following sets of "eyes" belong to:

Buford-Ward-Riches House (1875), Indianapolis.

These "eyes" are gazing down at you from atop the Buford-Ward-Riches House in Indianapolis, Indiana. Built in 1875 in the French Second Empire style with a Mansard roof, it is known as one of only five such houses left in the city. Those "lookout" eyes certainly came in handy for watching for approaching (or encroaching) visitors, expected or not.

Horner-Terrill House (c.1875), Indianapolis, in 1932.

These "eyes" are among the extant dormers of the Horner-Terrill House, also located in Indianapolis, another of its five remaining French Second Empire homes. Built c.1875, the house is a hybrid of the asymmetrical massing, floor plan, and cornice brackets of the Italian Villa style and the French Second Empire Mansard roofs and landmark corner tower with corner porch. The tower, supplying a few other sets of lookout "eyes" (in fact, there are "eyes" all around the house – so watch out), was once crowned by a Mansard roof with ornate metal cresting, from which approachers and intruders could certainly be watched from above and afar.

Horner-Terrill House (c.1875), Indianapolis, in May 2013.

Sadly, the Horner-Terrill House is in disrepair, a victim of deferred maintenance and two aborted attempts at restoration. This isn't even the most recent image of it; it was taken 13 years ago, and recent reports indicate that the house is still standing, but it continues to deteriorate, and its rear wing has partially collapsed. Hopefully it can be restored soon, "eyes" and all.

6-8 W. 95th St. (1894, H.E.P. Hartwell), New York City.

These porthole "eyes" with astonished brows mark the twin entrances of 6-8 W. 95th St. in Manhattan, one "eye" per entry. Built in 1894 from a design by Horace Edgar Poe Hartwell for his real estate speculator brother Luther Francis Hartwell, these mirror-image townhouses blend Renaissance Revival and Spanish Baroque styles, enriched with foliate carvings around their oculi and on the railings of their stoops, making these "eyes" irresistible to stare at. (The interiors were just as irresistible, promoted in 1893 as "Artistic Boston Houses" with "marble walls, mosaic floors, fine cabinet work, Louis XVI parlors, old English foyer halls, First Empire dining rooms, nothing like them in the market.") And look: each house has its own "private eyes" at attic level, so if you pay a visit here, you can be sure that, in the words of another classic '80s number, "Somebody's watching me."

Log house, Arkhangelsk, Russia. Photo by Sergey Yakovlev.

Portholes make good door windows, too, providing a broader range of vision of who's on the other side than "magic eye" peepholes – especially with one porthole per eye! These "eyes" are on a double entry to a log house in Arkhangelsk, Russia, a splendid example of Nordic log construction that makes sure you can watch who's coming.

Carpenter Gothic house with window nose and eyes, door mouth, porch mustache.

This is but a sampling of the thousands of houses and buildings with "eyes" and "faces" that can be seen all over the world. And I'm sure you can spot some in your neighborhood, on your travels, or even in your home, if you eye – make that 'ogle' – your surroundings more prudently.

But pay heed – somebody may be watching you!

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Tozzer's transformation

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:32:47 +0000

Tozzer Anthropology Building (2014, Kennedy & Violich Architecture), Harvard University. Photo by Todd Larson.

Tozzer Library (1974, Johnson & Hotvedt), Photo courtesy of Flickr.

The recent bestowal of the Harleston Parker Medal / People's Choice Award on Harvard University's Tozzer Anthropology Building (above) is thrilling news. It is the apex of the long-time-coming renewal of one of Harvard's most outmoded, poorly designed, badly lit buildings – that 1974 mound of modernism called Tozzer Library (left).

Entrance to Tozzer Library. Photo courtesy of the Cambridge Historical Commission.

I was contemptuous of that bland brick nothing-box, mainly because I had spent two miserable years there on my first post-college job as a front-desk receptionist and stooge under the most grumpy and bored of bosses. My menial tasks (about which he often teased me about how un-challenging they were) included sticking date-due slips and plates and labels on books, alphabetizing index cards, filling out commercial bindery request slips for new book acquisitions, checking out books and collecting fines for overdue ones from patrons, arranging six free library visits for outsiders, fetching books and senior honors theses for students and profs, answering the same old visitor queries about where the Peabody Museum, the MCZ [Museum of Comparative Zoology] Library, the bathroom, the Xerox machine, the nearest Centrex phone, etc., etc., were, and forever redirecting deliveries meant for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology next door (below).

Peabody Museum (1877, Robert H. Slack), Tozzer Library (1974, Johnson & Hotvedt)

Of course, the library's main entrance (above) fooled a lot of people into thinking that was the Peabody Museum, rather than its distinctively Mansard-roofed Victorian brick next-door neighbor (left), which made its modern progeny look like a remnant of an industrial park by comparison.

Tozzer Library (1974, Johnson & Hotvedt), Harvard University.

Which was a shame, considering that one of its architects was E. Verner Johnson, eminent designer of more than 200 museums, from the MIT Museum to the Smithsonian Institution's Arts & Industries Building to an expansion of Boston's Museum of Science. His "museum touch" was sadly absent from this Peabody Museum extension; its replacement is far more museum-like in its form.

And I'm sure you can see how the library externally expressed the ennui of my job (and my hostility toward visitors) with its nondescript exterior, clumsy massing, erratic and sparse fenestration, and awkward continuation of Divinity Avenue's streetscape, all of which made it seem to turn its back on the public – not a very kind architectural invitation inside. But I must say this: it contained one of the first wheelchair-accessible ramps (which has been a construction standard since the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990). However, the crisscrossing ramp usurped the reception area, robbing it of vital space for seating, socializing, and art displays.

Interior of Tozzer Library. Photo courtesy of E. Verner Johnson.

Which may have helped to cramp the rest of the interior as well. Here, the Phoenix seems to reach for more space than it is allotted to fly freely overhead. It is hemmed in by its atrium's narrowness and is illuminated on only one side by a single running clerestory. Glaring fluorescent cove lighting has to make up for the deficit of natural light.

Study area in Tozzer Library. Photo courtesy of William M.C. Lam.

In Perception and Lighting as Formgivers for Architecture (1977), William M.C. Lam explained his lighting of the library: "The book stacks were oriented perpendicular to the long axis of the coffers so that the books would 'see' the brightest portion of the ceiling."

Study area in Tozzer Library. Photo courtesy of William M.C. Lam.

And so did its patrons – too much. The ceiling's brightness permeated the atmosphere with an antiseptic, hospital-like glare that made users miss the warm glow of the natural sunlight, incandescent lighting, and even candlelight Harvard's older buildings had depended on to shed light on the work of its students, professors and visiting scholars.

Offices and study rooms suffered from the same. Lam wrote, "Track lighting [provides] supplementary task illumination when the larger coffers are subdivided to form small offices [left]. Local lighting is built into each carrel [right]." Which were fine for administration and studies, but did not amount to a very welcoming work or study environment. The clean lines, cove-lit ceiling, off-white palette, and industrial uniformity of the finish materials suggested the absence of something – which certainly contributed to my ho-hum there.

Reception area, Tozzer Anthropology Building, Harvard (2014, Kennedy & Violich Architects). Photos by John Horner.

This is the reception I would have preferred to be greeted with every morning. It's spacious, fluid, comfortable, clear in its direction to other parts of the building, softly hued and shaded, brightly illuminated by sun, and very conducive to stopping to study, socialize, or gaze at the displays. In fact, the two-story Mayan stela, once nestled in a tight corner at the base of the old Tozzer Library's entry ramp, is now given more room to assert its historical identity and beauty, presenting the Tozzer Anthropology Building as one of the world's most renowned repositories of anthropological, archaeological and ethnological artifacts, scholarship and records.

Atrium/lightwell, Tozzer Anthropology Building, Harvard (2014, Kennedy & Violich Architects). Photo by John Horner.

Atrium lounge, Tozzer Anthropology Building. Photo by John Horner.

Copious, opulent sunlight cascades from a far-reaching skylight, blessing studies or lounging with the radiance of nature as an enlightening stimulus, and leaving a fiery glow upon the birch panels, expressing the sun and nature dependency of ancient cultures. Rafters cast diagonal shadows on the woodwork, adding to the angular drama. The old library's cubic confines couldn't present patrons with such a soaring spectacle. The running balcony corridor invites faculty and workers from all corners to partake of this wonder, unlike the "siloing" in the old library.

Peabody Museum and Tozzer Anthropology Building, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Photo by John Horner.

What accounts for this wonder? The building's polygonal form, suggesting a prehistoric artifact or ziggurat. The copper-paneled hip roof's angled top creates the diagonal skylight that suns the study lounge, while complementing the Peabody's old roof gables – which Tozzer Library's flat, low roof certainly couldn't do.

Entrance to Tozzer. Photo by John Horner.

The quirky entrance, diapered in patterned brickwork to evoke the spirit of ancient masonry, gives us the sense of entering a cave for an archaeological discovery, while creating engagingly angled light-and-shadow patterns when the sun hits it.

This is a much more enticing, intimate entry into the wonderland of anthropology, archaeology and ethnology than Tozzer Library's blandly square, spatially cumbersome entrance was, which was little different from entering a corporation in a suburban office park every morning. Now we enter an academic/artistic realm, and the relatively small entry door, framed by the angular lines of crafted brick, piques our fascination about the knowledge and culture that lie within.

Tozzer Anthropology Building (2014, Kennedy & Violich Architecture), Harvard University. Photo by Shelley Zatsky.

The unusual rhythm of fenestration on the front and rear facades adds to the playfulness that was sorely lacking in the old library's square sobriety. The variation of window placement among the levels complements the skew diagonals of the skylight roof and entrance, giving the building a sculptural street presence that complements the archaeological stonework on display inside the building and on its grounds. Furthermore, the windows protrude, rather than recede, from their façade, which suggests that the building is bursting with anthropological activity and sunny, sumptuous study space, unlike the boxed-in feeling Tozzer Library gave its workers and patrons.

Tozzer Anthropology Building (2014, Kennedy & Violich Architecture), rear, by the Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

Peabody Museum, Tozzer Anthropology Building entry. Photo by Nicholas Ruhland.

Tozzer Library and the Tozzer Anthropology Building demonstrate how architecture can foster a community and symbolize its academic goals, in the latter case, and can distance its users and spaces from one another and reduce them to do-the-job utility, in the former. Even the ramp distanced the library from the museum, relegating us library staff to the dull side of the tracks.

Peabody Museum (1877), Tozzer Anthropology Building (2014).

Tozzer entrance sign. Photo by Kent Borg.

The new Tozzer – a finalist for the actual Harleston Parker Medal in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2025 – unifies Harvard's anthropology, archaeology and ethnology departments and their library into a coherent entity, blended internally by atrium light and fluid circulatory spaces and externally by artful brickwork and regular rhythms of fenestration along Divinity Avenue and in the rear courtyard it shares with the museum. This goes beyond thinking outside the box and correcting a big mistake made by an architect who should have stuck to museums. It bridges the Peabody Museum and its new neighbor into the centrally coherent center for studies and exhibits of ancient cultures Harvard needed all along — as did I.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Remembering the 9/11 FDNY firefighters

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:52:32 +0000

FDNY rescue workers at Ground Zero. FEMA photo by Andrea Booher

FEMA photo by Bri Rodriguez

As a former blogger and proposal writer for an architecture firm specializing in fire stations, which designed 21st-century station renovations for Fire Department of New York (FDNY) Engine Companies 63, 217 and 235, I find it fitting to remember the 343 FDNY firefighters killed in the line of duty in their attempts to rescue World Trade Center attack victims on September 11, 2001, 25 years ago today.

Collapse of South Tower on Sept. 11, 2001, 9:59 a.m., as
seen from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Photo by Paul Joffe.

Those brave, lost souls included three from EC 217 in Brooklyn, who perished in the South Tower's 9:59 a.m. collapse: Steven Coakley (age 36), Neil Joseph Leavey (34), and Lt. Kenneth J. Phelan, Sr. (41) "We were standing in a sea of body parts," surviving EC 217 Lt. (ret.) Thomas McGoff told the Tunnel to Towers Foundation. "Stevie Coakley and Neil Leavey were with me, and they saw people coming out of the South Tower. Meanwhile, they're standing in the collapse zone of jumpers [from the tower]. So Stevie says to me, 'I'm going to take Neil across the street and chase these people up the block. Be careful, stay together, and we'll meet you at the command post.' ... Without Stevie and Neil, we would have lost more civilians by getting hit and killed by jumpers."

"Lieutenant Kenneth Phelan embodied that spirit of selflessness," said New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin at the dedication of a red memorial street sign in Phelan's memory in his hometown of Maspeth, Queens, NY, on July 22, 2026. "On September 11th, he answered the call to serve at a neighboring firehouse that was short a member, giving his life after fourteen years of dedicated service to the FDNY."

Firefighter Steven Coakley.

Firefighter Neil Joseph Leavey.

Lt. Kenneth Phelan Sr.

Collapse of North Tower on Sept. 11, 2001,
10:28 a.m. Photo courtesy of Facebook.

The North Tower's 10:28 a.m. collapse vanquished the entire crew of EC 235, aka the "Monroe Six," at 206 Monroe St. in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood: Lt. Steven Bates (age 42), Nicholas Paul Chiofalo (39), Francis "Frankie" Esposito (32), Lee S. Fehling (28), Lawrence G. Veling (44), and Capt. Timothy "Timmy" Stackpole (42), along with Chief Dennis A. Cross (60), last seen entering the North Tower. "My dad was with Captain Timothy Stackpole...their bodies were found relatively close," Cross's youngest daughter, Denise Cross Feldman, told Dons Press. "On that ride to Bellevue [Morgue], the city was quiet, solemn, covered in dust, covered in debris, plastered with pictures of the missing, a slow motion movie that Hollywood can never replicate, never...

"With every breath I took in, I felt strong like my dad. I felt special and proud that I had a dad who risked his own life each day to save the lives of others."

Chief Dennis A. Cross.

"On March 10, 2001, Timmy returned to his lieutenant's job – full duty," his widow, Tara Stackpole, told the National Fallen Firefighters Association (NFFF). "He was promoted to captain on September 6, 2001, and was in FDNY headquarters, off-duty, the morning of September 11. Of course, he responded... His remarkable story has inspired many and his love for the job has touched many firefighters across the country."

Capt. Timothy "Timmy" Stackpole.

Lt. Steven J. Bates.

Firefighter Nicholas Paul Chiofalo.

Firefighter Francis "Frankie" Esposito.

Firefighter Lee S. Fehling.

Firefighter Lawrence G. Veling.

World Trade Center firefighter requests ten more colleagues.
U.S. Navy photo by Journalist First Class Preston Keres.

Joan R. Daley of EC 63 in the Bronx died of cancer at age 55 on September 27, 2009, eight years after her part in the 9/11 rescue efforts. She was but one of the more than 600 firefighters who have passed away as a result of inhaling the many toxins the tower collapses unleashed into the air. These include asbestos, benzene, cement/drywall dust, crystalline silica, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and heavy metals such as cadmium, lead and mercury from office equipment and wiring.

Firefighter Joan R. Daley.

"Firefighter Daley was an amazing woman," reported the NFFF. "She was hired by the FDNY in 1982, as one of the first females in the department... She was not only a role model for women, she was a hero for those who felt they didn't belong... In 2001, when the Twin Towers fell, Firefighter Daley participated in the recovery efforts. Sadly, it was these long days that would cause her to become ill and ultimately pass away from cancer. In a career that is dominated by men, Daley broke ground until her retirement in 2009."

FDNY Firehouse Engine Company 10 on 9/11. Courtesy FDNY 10 House.

Ground Zero also highlighted what matters most when we break ground on new or renovated fire stations, designing for those who constantly put their lives on the line for public safety. This design process extends beyond quickening response time, upgrading dispatch technology, and building hardening to provent structural disaster like what happened to FDNY Station 10, across the street from the World Trade Center, on 9/11. Post-9/11

FDNY Firehouse EC 10 after reconstruction. Photo by Michael DiNatale.

advancements in fire station design and construction also encompass decontamination systems with dedicated turnout gear rooms and state-of-the-art toxin-extractor equipment washing machines. These features divide the fire station into "hot," "warm" and "cold" zones.

Decontamination room in new fire station, North Acton, MA. Photo by Maia Kennedy.

The hot zone, or Red Zone, encompasses the apparatus bays that garage firetrucks and exterior equipment storage, that is, the area with the highest contamination. The warm zone, or Yellow Zone, incorporates decon rooms, dirt and toxin extractor washing machines, showers, and specialized Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) cleaning spaces, that is, the transition area between the fire station's dirtiest and cleanest realms.

Fire station single sleeping quarters. Photo by FirePhoto.

The cold zone, or Green Zone, is the toxin-free living area: living quarters, bunk rooms, kitchens, dayrooms, break rooms, fitness rooms, offices. Cold-zone air pressure is often heightened to stop filtration of contaminants.

Training room, Northbridge Fire Headquarters. Photo by Robbie Robinson.

New and renovated stations are also receiving single sleeping quarters, as opposed to group dormitories; larger break rooms and kitchens; larger and more apparatus bays with fortified bay doors and slab floors; backup power grids and substations; and more spacious high-tech training rooms for growing first-responder forces.

Cambridge Fire Headquarters, Cambridge, MA, in renovation. Photo by Todd Larson.

In the name of both environmental protection and firefighter health and safety, today's stations incorporate sustainable green technology, such as photovoltaic solar panels, LED lighting, and high-efficiency heating and cooling from geothermal wells. This has made some stations net-zero and fossil-fuel-free (left), reducing the carbon footprint.

My old firm practices all these new standards, and more, regularly in its public safety facility designs. The architect's post-9/11 commitment to these design principles earned him coveted admission to then New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's NYC Design and Construction Excellence Program in 2005.

This honor enabled the architect to redesign the aging EC 217 and EC 235 in 2009 and EC 63 in 2013. All three of these revamped fire stations were cited as outstanding examples of public safety facility design in We Build the City: New York City's Design + Construction Excellence Program (ORO Editions, 2013).

Engine Company 217, Brooklyn, NY, built 1909, renovated 2009.

EC 217 and EC 235, built respectively in 1909 and 1895 as single-bay fire stations, each received a hardy new apparatus slab floor with drainage and firetruck maintenance systems. These met FDNY standards for supporting the 90,000-pound fire vehicle that hadn't been around in the days of the horse-drawn fire wagons these stations were built for, and was certainly needed for extreme emergencies like 9/11. EC 217 was reinforced with a new concrete truck apron for structural disaster hardening and containment of toxic fumes from the new bunkrooms, restrooms and offices on the upper floor, but its historic frontage was restored.

Engine Company 235, Brooklyn, NY, built 1895, renovated 2009.

As part of its own historic restoration and structural disaster hardening, EC 235 was tuck-pointed with new mortar and crowned with a new copper roof, ensuring it an additional century of service to its old neighborhood. The service of both stations was fortified with new housewatches and gear grids with the most advanced FDNY dispatch technology, allowing firefighters quicker response.

Engine Company 63, Bronx, NY, first organized 1896, renovated 2013.

EC 63 was expanded to house three fire vehicles – Batallion 15, Engine 63, and Ladder 39 – to expand its readiness for emergencies. Structural disaster hardening was supplied with an all-new structure and façade, faced in ash-gray with a terra cotta rainscreen and inset cement board panels, contrasted with fortified red bay doors and an American flag waving on a flagpole, in remembrance of 9/11 and other firefighter tragedies, and as an expression of fortitude in the face of danger. Toxic fume containment was fully taken care of with a decontamination area on the first floor, safely separated from the new bunkrooms, lockers, restrooms, fitness center, offices, and training/study rooms on the upper level.

Ladder 39 exits EC 63 in the evening.
We Build the City described EC 63's renewal as follows: "This expansion doubles the building's size and meets Fire Department of New York guidelines – giving firefighters the room they need to perform their duties safely and effectively."

Awards the renovation of EC 63 received include the Bronze Place 2013 National Station Style Design Award for Renovated Fire Station Design from Penton's Fire Chief Magazine, in addition to the 2014 Fire Station Design Excellence Award from the Fire Industry Education Resource Organization (F.I.E.R.O.).

FDNY rescue workers at Ground Zero. FEMA photo by Andrea Booher.

As we remember 9/11's fallen FDNY firefighters, as well as the 72 lost NYPD law enforcement officers and the 2,977 civilian victims all those brave souls endeavored to rescue, let us move forward with the most advanced fire station design and construction possible to more fully equip our first responders for earth-shaking calamities such as this.

Never Forget.

An architectural declaration of independence

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:18:03 +0000

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has piqued my obsession with the architecture of its birthplace. Of prime appeal for me is how Independence Hall in Philadelphia (built 1732-1753 as the Pennsylvania State House) was not only designed to create the breathing room, elbow room and room to grow for Continental Congress to debate, shape and ratify this pivotal parchment, followed by the Constitution in 1787, but also conceived with the foresight of America's future expansion and the architectural user-friendliness it would require.

This 1752 drawing shows that the State House had its hip-roofed wings, linked to the headhouse by arcaded hyphens, from the beginning. This civic symmetry touted the edifice's central significance as the seat of the local government.

Independence Hall about 1776. Courtesy of the National Park Service.

The Pennsylvania State House was originally planned with this tripartite arrangement (by 1776, the wings were extended with wooden sheds, most likely for storage of firewood, ammo, animals and such) with the logical intent to distribute and compartmentalize its various bureaucratic functions into separate entities for the sake of efficiency of operation, clarity of location, and hierarchy of social standing. In the central headhouse sat Pennsylvania's Legislative Assembly, Executive Council and Judicial Courts, as well as the Long Gallery the colonial governor used for banquets and public events.

Independence Hall Tower (1750). Photo by Greg Balfour Evans.

All these government entities were solemnly topped, thereby unified as one architectural composition, around 1750 by the cupola-crowned tower, which landmarked the Pennsylvania State House in a way that signified its supremacy and clarified the carillon of its bells throughout the land of Philadelphia.

Yes, it was in this tower that the Liberty Bell rang, until its crack reduced it to a sculptural relic of its age, but emblazoned it with its own Mark of Zorro of the justice the founders fought for and the rebellion by which they won us our country.

The West Wing, as its houselike form suggests, housed living quarters for doorkeepers of the Pennsylvania Assembly, as well as books for the Library Company of Philadelphia, which Benjamin Franklin had founded in 1731 to make books accessible to all.

Today the West Wing proudly displays the Great Essentials, original printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, paying homage to those founding charters that were debated and drafted in the great room next door.

The identical East Wing stored public documents and governmental paperwork, so that the governing bodies would not be buried in paper as they politicked. Today the East Wing houses the America's National Parks store, a gift shop that sells historical books, 250th-anniversary souvenirs, and mementos such as magnets, postcards, and miniature Liberty Bells. Proceeds from their sales directly fund education and preservation programs at the Independence National Historical Park.

The central foyer, bridal stair, and Palladian window clue us into the Hall's sheer expanse by ushering us up to the grand rooms. We see how architects Andrew Hamilton and Edmund Woolley distributed the Hall's load-bearing columns to create free-flowing space.

Palladian window, Independence Hall. Photo by JG Photography.

This space was brightly illuminated with a Palladian window and double-height side windows. This composition of space and light expressed the freedom the Hall's Founding Fathers envisioned for the colonies that were represented there.

The ornate woodwork – banisters, scrolls, wainscoting, pediments, Palladian window, fluted Ionic pilasters, cornices, crown moldings – gave historical framework to the Liberty Bell until its 1976 relocation to accommodate more tourists.

Today the bell hangs solo in the ultramodern Liberty Bell Center, in plain window-wall sight of its old home but bereft of its historical milieu. Yet this new setting sheds new light and space on the bell's fortes and flaws.

Now we clearly see the wood yoke, its metal ties and bolts, the relief lettering of its recasters' names (Pass & Stow), the clapper, the braces, the rim frayed by souvenir hunters' pinching fingers, and the crack – which was not caused solely by ringing, but mainly by repairs gone awry. In 1846, to ring the bell for George Washington's birthday, the existing hairline crack was drill-widened to retard it and reduce its buzz when rung. (Forty drill-marks can be seen along the seam.) This worked at first – the ringing was "clear as a bell" on the Founding Father's anniversary – but soon the fissure spread, silencing the chime for good.

Nonetheless, the crack has become symbolic of the struggle and strain with which our Founders fought for our freedom, emerging scarred and cracked but largely intact. The crack is also a distinguishing mark of recognition that sets this bell apart from others, much as how the Leaning Tower of Pisa derives its tourist appeal from its tilt.

The bright, spacious Assembly Room supplied the requisite sunshine, elbow-room and elegance for Pennsylvania Assembly meetings, ratification of the Declaration on July 4, 1776, the signing of it on August 2, and the signing of the Constitution on September 17, 1787.

Congress Voting Independence (1784-1801, Robert Edge Pine & Edward Savage)

The room's ornamental restraint and high coved ceiling lent a sense of civic grace and spatial openness to those occasions (as shown here in Congress Voting Independence, a painting begun in 1784 by Robert Edge Pine and completed in 1801 by Edward Savage) without excessive visual distractions...

Assembly Room, Independence Hall, shown in 1856, by Max Rosenthal.

...though at one time there were more of those, as shown in this 1856 painting by Max Rosenthal (left)
and in the 1905 photograph (below), both done after the room was redone in 1833.

Assembly Room, Independence Hall, 1905. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

At that time it received an elaborate crown molding of triglyphs, triple wall panels, wider fluted pilasters with carved capitals, and a lavish crystal chandelier. In the mid-1900s the room was restored to a semblance of its original appearance to boost its tourist appeal. This was a mistake, because the 1833 remodeling had historical value of its own and was compatible with the Founders' vision for a democratic but civilized society. The rows of triglyphs nobly symbolized the peaceable meeting-house assembly of multiple delegates and citizens our democracy was founded on, and the triple wall panels served as handsome display frames for pictures of past presidents.

Photo by Corlia van Wyk.

Photo by R. Wallace.

The open-scrolled pediment (left), carved with a scallop-shell surrounded by a leaf frieze, crowns the central seat of the President of Continental Congress (right).

This was the perfect regal mitre for John Hancock to enscribe his famed signature on the Declaration, and for George Washington to preside over the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It is the only feature of the room's 18th-century woodwork to survive the 1833 remodeling. The "Rising Sun" chair, at which Hancock and Washington sat for those milestone episodes, is an English Chippendale chair carved on its crest with the appropriate images of a half-sun, a Liberty pole, and a Phrygian cap, aptly symbolizing the liberty gained through the Revolution.

Also here is the Syng Inkstand, made of fine silver by local silversmith Philip Syng in 1752, into which 56 Continental Congressmen dipped their quill pens to "mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" by signing Timothy Matlack's scribed parchment of the Declaration.

Declaration of Independence (1786-1818, John Trumbull).

But most of all I can hear the strains of "Sit down, John!" and "Someone oughta open up a window!" echo through the chamber in the movie 1776 as John Adams implores a reluctant Congress to "Vote yes! Vote for independency!" and rants, "We piddle, twiddle, and resolve, not one damn thing do we solve!" in his perpetual plaint about the political inefficiency Independence Hall's architects sought to curb.

To minimize piddling and twiddling and maximize resolution, they conceived the Committee Room. Pedimented doors provided a tasteful setting for the Assembly's committees to resolve conflicts and for local militia to store ammo.

The Governor's Council Chambers provided wood-panel warmth and fireplace radiance for colonial governors' meetings with the Council to green-light or red-light legislation the popularly elected Pennsylvania Assembly had passed.

The Supreme Court Chamber was an incubator for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's growth in, well, supremacy, as a model for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Fluted pilasters, triglyph friezes, pediments, turned-baluster rails, and a painting of the Pennsylvania Coat of Arms (replacing King George III's in 1785) lent learned solemnity to the chamber. The trio of arches signified the open democracy to come...

...as did the Long Room, a 100-foot chamber spanning the entire northern front of the Hall's headhouse, carefully designed with no obstructing columns or walls, so that the colonial governor of Pennsylvania could pack it to capacity for his receptions and banquets.

The Artist in His Museum (1822, Charles Willson Peale).

This floor-through space came in equally handy as a hospital/jail for wounded colonial prisoners of war during the British Army's occupation of Philadelphia in 1777-78, and, from 1802 to 1827, an exhibit space for Charles Willson Peale's (right) collection of fossils, shells, rocks, minerals, insects, 700 American birds, painted portraits by Charles and Rembrandt Peale (his son), and a massive fossilized mastodon skeleton. This was one of America's first natural history museums, giving rise to New York's American Museum of Natural History and Boston's Museum of Science. And to think that it all began where it all began!

Independence Hall in Philadelphia was the bastion of many beginnings – architectural, social, political, scientific – and provided generous, open, well-designed space for the American experiment in participatory democracy to develop, flourish, and inspire other nations.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sullivan's travels come home

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 02:41:00 +0000

World Trade Center West, the signature building of Seaport World Trade Center in Boston, may be my favorite of the diversely creative palette of buildings that kicked off the development of the city's Seaport District but unfortunately failed to inspire future designs of comparable originality there. For me, there are two reasons why this postmodern masterpiece rises above the rest.

Seaport World Trade Center, Boston. Photo by SeaportBostonHotel (CC BY-SA 4.0).

For one, it was designed by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood (KMW) in their signature postmodern style of squared columns articulating and monumentalizing building structure in the classical column tradition, but with the geometric simplicity of those Cuisenaire rods many of us learned mathematical concepts from (or just built things with) in school.

This gives World Trade Center West an outstanding expression of structural honesty in the soar of its verticality, unlike its undistinguished neighbors, Seaport Boston Hotel (above, center) and World Trade Center East (above, left), whose brick and sandstone cladding largely obscure their structure in a rather pompous fashion—and especially unlike the steel-and-glass skyscrapers that largely dominate Seaport's streetscape now. KMW used brick and a cantilevered cornice on World Trade Center West to recall the historic brick warehouse buildings of nearby Fort Point Channel, and the curving western façade allows more of its offices picturesque waterfront views, with a nod to the brick bowfront architecture of Beacon Hill and the South End as well as the billows of waves and ship sails. "The form, language and materials of the building relate to the maritime character of the site," according to KMW's website.

Wainwright Building (1891, Louis Sullivan), St. Louis, MO.
Photo by W. LeMay (CC BY-SA 2.0).

World Trade Center West also recalls the brick high-rises of Louis Henry Sullivan—my second reason for making it the cream of Seaport's crop. As the virtual inventor of the skyscraper, Sullivan went for an honest, organic expression of the skyscraper's structure and the upward soar of its verticality, hence the brick piers culminating in Celtic-inspired floral ornamentation at the cornice, giving the impression that they are growing up like flowers. That was what Sullivan meant by "form follows function": the soaring vertical form of a skyscraper is shaped by its function as a tall building housing multiple offices, yet it stands as a monument to progress — upward mobility, and the necessity to build taller on limited footprints to house increasing populations of workers. For that was the proper function of the skyscraper, in Sullivan's mind, which gave it its monumental form.

Interestingly enough, Sullivan was born in Boston, but never practiced there. He detested its architecture for being too cramped and old-fashioned for his taste. Ever the innovator, he was drawn to the from-scratch reconstruction of Chicago following its Great Fire of 1871, where he could leave his own imprint on a new city in the sky. So I'm grateful that KMW was paying tribute to Sullivan's Boston origins with their World Trade Center West. This, in effect, brought him home to the city he had abandoned, to show what an impact he had, both in the new Chicago and now in the new neighborhood built from scratch in Boston — the Seaport District.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

'Complete fabrication'

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 02:06:00 +0000

That writing prompt I received in a recent Meetup writing group meeting got me to thinking that "complete fabrication," indeed may be the answer to the housing crisis we are ignoring, neglecting, disdaining, or forgetting the existence of. Mobile homes, prefabricated homes, tech-built homes—all the technology is there, the price is right, and the living is easy, so why don't we do them more often? Are we too focused on the bad rap prefab has gotten as a symbol of just eking by, living hand-to-mouth? Is the Sears-Roebuck kit of parts of the past not dream-home enough for us?

In short, are we too upwardly mobile to go mobile?

Frankly, mobile homes and trailers fascinate me, for the way they bring back the vintage practice of homesteading, as a couple I knew did when they bought some cheap land in the population-challenged community of Friendsville, Pa., placed a mobile home like this one on top of it, and made the perfect housewarming temple out of it.

A mobile home and trailer park on the cliffs above Beer, Devon, England.

Riding by a trailer-park community on largely unspoiled land in rural Connecticut that resembled this one in England, I realized how little is necessary to meet our living needs. And there are more than 100 such communities in Massachusetts—are people aware of them? Or does the mobile-home, trailer-park image suggest homelessness and vagrancy?

Are we too proud to live in our only affordable option? Or does complete fabrication mean it'll wear out quickly, either when it shows wear and tear or when our interests change and we become upwardly 'mobile' again?

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Inside out, outside in

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 02:04:00 +0000

Edith Farnsworth House (1951, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), Plano, Illinois. Photo by Teemu008 from Palatine, Illinois (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Photos by Paul R. Burley (CC BY-SA 4.0).

That line from the 1971 song "Perpetual Change" by the art-rock band Yes perfectly describes that breed of building bent on exposing its innards to looky-loos by glazing the barrier that's supposed to preserve its users' privacy, so from the outside we can notice the inner perpetual change as occupants shuffle about, gesticulations fly, furniture is rearranged, styles are changed, or (heaven forbid) crimes are witnessed.

This is not unlike the way actors break the "fourth wall" to invite their audiences into their private worlds by revealing secrets, spilling their guts, or asking for sympathy or help, most notably as the island-stranded Prospero does at the close of Shakespeare's The Tempest:

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

Photo by Paul R. Burley (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Edith Farnsworth House (1951) in Plano, Illinois, recently renamed for its owner to honor her vision for it as well as her architect's, epitomizes this transparency. Its window-walls reveal all indoor functions – bedroom, kitchen, living room – unifying them with the outdoors in a two-way exchange.

Glass House (1948, Philip Johnson), New Canaan, Connecticut. Photos by Edelteil (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Glass House (1948, Philip Johnson), New Canaan, Connecticut.
Photos by Edelteil (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Going further with this dissolution between the interior private world and the exterior public realm is Philip Johnson's Glass House (1948) in New Canaan, Connecticut. In fact, it forced its owner to sacrifice privacy — unless its isolation in a forested idyll remote from urban hustle-and-bustle was his definition of privacy. When COVID caused many to flee to second homes in the suburbs, the exurbs, and the rurals, such a house would especially come in handy. This was how both the Edith Farnsworth House and the Glass House were ahead of their time sociologically as well as architecturally, made to order for mass exoduses.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

The 'hills' of Harvard

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 01:53:00 +0000

(L-R) Science Center, Memorial Hall, Gund Hall, Adolphus Busch Hall; Art Museums in foreground. Photo by Nick Allen (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Memorial Hall (1870-77, Ware & Van Brunt), Gund Hall (1972, John Andrews), Harvard University.

Brick and stone historicism has clearly predominated Harvard University's architectural history as the gold (or crimson) standard for campus construction, save for sporadic breaches of this tradition when the midcentury/ millennial modernism of reinforced concrete, steel framing, window walls and skylights became fashionable according to what school of thought was governing the Graduate School of Design or the Building Committee's impulses.

Science Center (1972-73, Josep Lluis Sert), Harvard University.

Adolphus Busch Hall, (1912-1921, German Bestelmeyer), Harvard University.

Yet I recently noticed a common thread among the stylistic diversity these traditions and their disruptions produced: a "hill" building technique that clustered and stacked an edifice like a pyramid, directing the eye upward to a summit of one kind or another.

In so doing, each of these "hills" articulates and distinguishes its individual parts and "divisions" on its exterior, cluing us in to the multiple uses the building was assigned as we optically mount to its summit. Though that is a common characteristic of modern architecture ("form follows function," in Louis Sullivan's words), some of Harvard's historical styles had already adapted that practice as early as the mid-19th century.

Photo by chensiyuan (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Initiating this building-bulking approach to Harvard's campus expansion was Memorial Hall, built in 1870-77 from a High Victorian Gothic design by William Robert Ware and Henry Van Brunt in memory of Harvard alumni who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Union in the Civil War. The building's diversified massing denotes its multiple functions, which Henry James described in The Bostonians (1885-86) as:

...three main divisions: one of them a theater, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War.

Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall. Photo by Bestbudbrian (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The first "division" is Sanders Theatre. Modeled on Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre (1664-1669) at Oxford, Sanders adapts the in-the-round configuration of Rome's Theatre of Marcellus of the 1st century B.C. and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre of 1614, with wood-encased iron ties elegantly opening the space to all present.

Sanders' rotund room is externally expressed as a basilica articulates its rounded apse. The mansard roof with "streaky bacon" slate tilework shapes the soar of the ceiling, hence the resonance of the acoustics. Busts of orators Demosthenes, Cicero, John Chrysostom, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, Edmund Burke, and Daniel Webster adorn the semicircle of lancet-arched dormer gables.

Annenberg Hall, Memorial Hall. Photo by Bestbudbrian (CC BY-SA 4.0).

James' second "division" is Annenberg Hall, a dining hall paralleling the majesty of the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Curving hammerbeam rafters with quatrefoil cutouts uphold the mansard roof's soaring structure and inject the space with awe-inspiring drama, ecclesiastically enriched by stained-glass windows and grand chandeliers.

Photo by P.K. Nelson (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Stained-glass windows, brick buttresses, and a mountainous gable continuing the streaky-bacon slate work articulate Annenberg as a dignified space to enjoy a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. A cloister with Gothic-arched side entries on either side presents a welcoming, open-ended "porch" to the main attraction, as a narthex introduces a church.

Photo by pundit (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The final "division" is the visually elaborate central portion, crowned by the landmark copper-finial-adorned bell tower and bookended by pairs of peaked turrets flanking stained-glass-window-surmounted entrances. This signifies the space with the highest level of architectural ceremony and social remembrance, the Memorial Transept. In this cross-space that comprises the horizontal segment of the Latin cross Memorial Hall forms as a whole, ribbed vaulting, lancet arches, marble plaques and floors, stained-glass windows, monumental chandeliers, and carved woodwork combine to visually impel us to pay respect to those who perished in the United States' most divisive, decisive war, with the solemnity of the most sacred of Gothic cathedrals.

Repurposing Memorial Hall's pyramidal schemata and tripartite division in a Germanic context is Adolphus Busch Hall, built in 1921 from a design by a Dresden architect whose name reveals the style: German Bestelmeyer.

From a stacked central clock tower splays out diverse wings and ells denoting diverse art collections in what was originally called the Germanic Museum. All are unified by a stucco finish that breaks with Harvard's brick tradition as a forerunner to the gray-beige concrete of its modernist structures. Maintaining the building's historical integrity are a terra cotta tile roof, classical balustrades, and the tri-level clock tower that gives it the landmark dignity of a Rathaus or Gaswerk in a German town.

The hall was originally designed to house collections and reproductions of German art from the country's Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance periods, as indicated by the triumvirate aggregate of wings and ells and the interior's off-white stonework and muted classicism, which casts off stylistic pretensions to let the art run the show. Since the collections have been consolidated in the Harvard Art Museums, Adolphus Busch Hall is today a popular rental venue that adds a Teutonic touch to weddings, banquets, cocktail parties and other private functions.

Dunster House (1930, Charles Coolidge), Harvard University. Photo by Vadivel Ramasamy.

Dunster House, one of Harvard's twelve undergraduate residential houses built in the 1930s along the Charles River under then President Abbott Lawrence Lowell's House Plan, is the most imaginative of the houses. Architect Charles Coolidge had a tight triangular site to work with, which he elegantly symbolized in the prevalence of triangular pediments amid the parts and their pyramidal hillock rise toward the central bell tower. This was modeled on Christopher Wren's Tom Tower of Christ Church, Oxford (1681-82), with a more Georgian than Gothic slant, for Harvard tradition's sake.

Dunster articulates its individual parts forthrightly, as a residential village providing 475 undergrads and 25 staff members with a dining hall, a library, music practice rooms, an art studio, a student kitchen and grille, a gym and squash court, and a smart classroom.

George Gund Hall broke the rules. By building from the inside out and expressing its structure as sculptural form, Harvard Graduate School of Design alumnus John Andrews was determined to make his school's new home exemplary of the Corbusian concrete brutalism and the steel-and-glass framework of the International Style that were trendy in 1972.

Photo by Bobak Ha'Eri (CC BY 3.0).

Yet, in doing so, the building preserved its predecessors' essentials: the triangular bent that shaped Dunster Hall, the light grayness that made Adolphus Busch Hall deviate from Harvard's crimson-brick norm, the ceiling-beam exposure of Memorial Hall, and the "hilliness" of all three, but with more of a steep

incline this time, in the form of steps and levels of "trays" of drafting tables for students to complete their projects under the luminar purity of skylights, with the bare-bones expression of the roof-rafter structure constantly hovering over their heads to remind them of the architectonic principles they had to focus on in the modern age of design.

Such honest structural expression allowed Gund Hall to expand Memorial Hall's "porch" and "cloister" to new heights and breadths with the use of pilotis, or cylindrical concrete columns, as load-bearing elements. This formed a broad, deep verandah that gave as much exposure to the building's progenitor — Memorial Hall — across the street as it did to Gund's structure internally.

Photo by Gunnar Klack (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Structural sincerity stretches sky-high at the Science Center (1972-73), a daringly defiant mammoth of modernism that delineates its parts to the point of discord among them. In doing so, architect Josep Lluis Sert — then dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design — extolled the scientific advancements taught inside by expressing them the form of advanced engineering and construction, clustering and stepping them as a jumbled pile to represent the ongoing growth and progress of science — in essence, the scientific method, and the erratic process of constant discovery, articulated by exposing the architectonic method of the building's construction.

The "spider" of angled roof-girders crowns the lecture hall with an entomological reference that proclaims the building's scientific use monumentally — and a handsome pair of "hills" the ziggurat and spider doth make.

The stepped semi-ziggurat provides a setback to avoid casting a skyscraper's shadow on the plaza. This gives the building a sculptural presence like that of El Castillo at Chichen Itza in Mexico (below).

El Castillo, Chichen Itza, Mexico (8th–12th c. AD). Photo by Alastair Rae (CC BY-SA 2.0).

This is how the Science Center respectfully defers to Memorial Hall as Gund Hall did: by lessening its bulk so it won't block Memorial's majestic view. The ziggurat also pays respect to its surroundings by grounding itself as a one-story lecture-hall pavilion, inviting students inside on a human scale...

...only to soar beyond that scale to awestrike its occupants with "a magnificent Piranesi-like interior with the volume of Boston's Symphony Hall," as Bainbridge Bunting and Margaret Henderson Floyd put it in Harvard: An Architectural History. This Piranesian symphony is rife with spatial expressions of the far-reaching dimensions of science: skylit atria, suspended staircases, balcony overlooks, endless corridors, and more labyrinthine adventures through space and light. This web of wonder creates a network of hills, plateaus and valleys that visually prepare us for the adventures through science students and faculty are about to experience in this cosmos of classrooms, labs, lecture halls, offices, a library, and various landing places for relaxation, phone-recharing and laptop travail.

Chain of Life (1996) by John Robinson. Photo by Charles Ling.

Olivetti Showroom Wall Relief (1954) sandscape by Constantino Nivola. Photo by Sarah C.

Picking up on the art-display tradition of Memorial Hall and the Germanic Museum, the Science Center has some of its own, including John Robinson's Chain of Life (1996), an atrium-suspended mobile depicting the compound of two carbon atoms (black), one nitrogen atom (green), one oxygen atom (blue) and two hydrogen atoms (chrome) that theoretically made life on earth possible; and Constantino Nivola's sandscape Olivetti Showroom Wall Relief (1954), transported from the New York City display room of the Olivetti typewriter company as a bas-relief mural of whimsical abstraction to add more life to the Science Center's antiseptic modernism.

More to come...

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

A Flower's Seasons

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 01:30:00 +0000

A flower's petal
Starts to settle
Early in the fall.

A flower's bud
Escapes the mud
With the robin's call.

A flower's blossom
Plays opossum
On a summer night.

A flower's pistil
Shines like crystal
In the winter light.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

The turn in the road

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Larson) — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:56:00 +0000

This is my meditation on Paul Cézanne's 1881 painting "Turn in the Road" at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. It exemplifies Cézanne's passion for complex juxtapositions of diverse spaces and shapes that challenge our view of the world. For instance, the bend in the road leads us into a deep space while maintaining its simple flatness.

Enjoy.

The turn in the road signified community. Encompassing a pleasant peninsula of mature trees and mossy rocks in a gesture of sempiternal circular movement, it piqued my anticipation that a cul-de-sac lay ahead of it, one that forged a close-knit, friendly community among disparate dwellings with an embracing cloak of greenery. The Creedence Clearwater Revival classic blasting on my Bluetooth encapsulated my reverie immaculately:

You can ponder perpetual motion,
Fix your mind on a crystal day,
Always time for a good conversation,
There's an ear for what you say.
Come on the risin' wind,
We're going up around the bend...

However, once I was up around the bend, the settlement ahead spoke a colder language. The bite in the air of the late April wind-chill factor and the diffusion of gray-white light from broken clouds seemed to intensify the cold shoulder that the high fence, the helter-skelter houses, and their tree-screened windows were turning toward me. All was quiet in the little village, but a silence of the unfriendly nature, as if the houses were disappearing into the rock of their surroundings and fossilizing the humanity they once contained within their stucco walls and clay-tiled roofs. Yet their three-dimensionality, popping out in all directions like crystalline rock shimmering in the sun, suggested that a livelihood lurked therein after all.

Questions crossed my mind: Is this a gated community? Or can I enter freely? Does anyone there have any time for a good conversation? Could I offer one? Is there an ear for what I have to offer? Who lives there, anyway?

Undaunted by the fence's lining of the road with the perpetual message of rester en dehors, I winded along, an end in sight for to see. It turned out that my perspective was distorted; the fence seemed to give way to an old dirt road that opened right up to the village, as if spreading a welcome mat yet warding off my entry with the intimation of poverty or decadence.

Since only one house was turning its door and windows my way, the brown terrain was leading right up to its entry, and it was open, that seemed like a logical place for me to begin to unravel the mystery of this village. I ventured inside. It was barren, with that just-moved-out look. The paucity of windows lent a cavernousness to the interior. Suddenly a figure stepped into the light the open door was granting to the foyer.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!