Allston . . . and beyond

The internationally acclaimed Machado and Silvetti finally score their local mark

Skyline by Douglass Shand-Tucci

A great event is about to enliven Boston -- in Allston, a part of town that is rarely given the sort of attention usually reserved, say, for the Back Bay or the new Seaport District. Nor is the great event either skyscraper or courthouse, or any sort of center -- centennial, millennial, or whatever.

We are talking bragging rights to the new Allston Branch Library, for which there are plans to break ground in late summer; a building most eagerly awaited, not only because Allston has needed such a library for many years, but because it will be an architectural milestone.

Aside from one superb but well-hidden house in suburban Concord and a few exquisite but largely inaccessible remodelings in the Back Bay and Cambridge, the Allston Library will be the first work in Greater Boston by Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, whom just a month ago I called Boston's hottest architects.

As architectural theorists whose work daringly pushes the edge of current thought and practice, these men have long enjoyed worldwide repute. Their design projects have been published in architectural books and journals here and in Europe and exhibited in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Venice and Paris Biennales.

As teachers, both men are also distinguished. Each is now a tenured professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and each has headed a leading school of architecture -- Machado at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, and Silvetti at Harvard, where he is currently chair of the department of architecture.

Their built work has come more slowly. It is not entirely because of Boston's well-known conservatism in matters architectural that so great an honor as Machado and Silvetti's first local public work is only now about to grace Allston. There is not a lot of Machado and Silvetti's architecture anywhere, although they have in recent years done notable buildings at Princeton, where they are the authors of the university's overall master plan.

In fact, they have been highly selective over the years -- too much so, perhaps -- and both partners typically hold design control (particularly in its early, conceptual stage) very closely. They also strive for much: in their own words, for "conceptual clarity and visual intensity"; in the words of an admiring colleague and disciple, for nothing less than "a new relationship between history and invention."

Furthermore, they attempt all this in a diverse range of stylistic languages. Asked about influences, for example, one will speak of Andrea Palladio, the other of Aldo Rossi, and both of Le Corbusier's residential work.

Their design, though, is always unmistakably Machado and Silvetti, and the fact that their projects have won award after award over the years -- both in this country and abroad -- surely signaled that it was only a matter of time before they achieved a breakthrough in their built work.

That happened when they won the prestigious competition to design the $100 million center of antiquities for the Getty Villa and Museum at Malibu, in Los Angeles, a commission that catapulted them into the league of international "star" architects that includes Renzo Piano, Raphael Moneo, and Frank Gehry.

For the cognoscenti, of course, they had already arrived in that company with their built work at Princeton. I remember my delight, for example, while reading Diane Ghirardo's Architecture After Modernism in 1996, to find in the last chapter that Machado and Silvetti's work was considered along with that of Piano and Gehry, Tadao Ando and Norman Foster. Theirs was the only Boston practice dealt with in that company, and their elegant parking garage (of all things) at Princeton was the final illustration in Ghirardo's book.

Although they are at work on a number of projects in Boston, including the Cyclorama complex in the South End, a bookstore has been the only place the general public was likely to benefit from their presence among us. Until the Allston Library.

The result of wide-ranging consultations with both librarians and local residents, the new library's design derives fundamentally from a number of functional necessities that the architects have skillfully turned to their advantage in their determination to design a beautiful as well as a practical building.

Believe it or not, among the most difficult problems for librarians everywhere is security. Machado and Silvetti have met this challenge quite elegantly. For example: they avoid large exterior areas of plate glass, and they accommodate the need within the library for maximum visual control of the space. That, as well as the community's need to use the building for meetings when the library is closed, surely inspired the plan of the structure. Its two wings, one with reading rooms and the other with meeting rooms, are conspicuously separate and usable quite independently. Each wing, moreover, flanks and surrounds a series of interior garden courts that are open to the sky. Their windowed walls (vandal-proof because of their interior location) light the reading rooms generously, as well as offering charming garden views to those within.

Tim Love, the project architect, under partner-in-charge Silvetti, calls them "reading gardens," and in one of them they have carefully preserved a rare European copper beech tree to give both beauty and shade.

It is the sort of design these architects are increasingly famous for, the sort that moved Los Angeles Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff to exclaim that "Machado and Silvetti . . . offer exquisite materials, elegant detailing, a delicate sense of history. The secret is that they are also sensitive urban planners . . . They see, rightly, that cities are made up of fragments of distorted, incomplete visions, and their design seeks to reflect that urban complexity."

The Allston streetscape exactly -- the complexity of which, ranging from 1920s three-deckers to post-World War II "Colonials," the design of this new library picks up and integrates with a fine bravura. The fact that Machado and Silvetti are able to pull this off testifies to the fact that they are very cosmopolitan designers.

Argentine-born, they were educated there, in Europe, and here, where they have become citizens. It is not every architect who would sing so lyrical a song in Allston, or be brave enough to endow so serious a work as a library with a butterfly roof.

Libraries may be serious, but they need not be dull or stuffy -- or red-brick-boring, either. Think again. And think of the next generation this library needs to attract.

And this is where these exceptionally cosmopolitan architects prove themselves so Bostonian -- indeed, so Emersonian. For the Boston Public Library, not content with the glories of its Copley Square landmark building, has for many years followed a rare and splendid tradition of gifting some of the most neglected city neighborhoods with branch libraries of outstanding distinction.

Some examples: the Parker Hill Branch Library of 1931, in Roxbury, was designed in a modified Gothic style by no less than Ralph Adams Cram, the Boston architect then of the widest international repute; the North End branch of 1965 is by Carl Koch, an important early modernist designer; the Charlestown branch, erected in 1970, is a notable work of striking cantilevered design by Eduardo Catalano, whose best-known Boston-area building is the MIT Student Center.

To this illustrious roll we can now add Machado and Silvetti.

What I like most about their work is that although their ideas are always well thought out and usually quite stimulating intellectually, the form those ideas take invariably catches my eye first. I am seduced, so to speak, before I am convinced -- and always by form that is very strong, so strong it easily encompasses a spare but deeply ingrained elegance, an elegance I experience with all the pleasure of a secret somehow discovered, against all odds, where least expected.

Consider the slate work on the façade at Allston, for example. It is roughly, crisply chiseled on the ground floor; above, however, the pattern of slates, used like shingles, is flat and planar. The effect in each case is bold, yet the palette could not be more subtle: the slates' variation of color is exquisite. Some will see the blues. Some will see the grays. Some will see the silvery green I like most of all.

Greater Boston has surely waited too long for its first public building by Machado and Silvetti. And Allston is very lucky.

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The Allston Library may be a harbinger of things to come. Though we are surely right to be fixating on the new Seaport District and the great opportunities that are hardly being taken advantage of there, we would do well to recall that Boston has more than one waterfront site where we are entitled to hope for something worthy and wonderful.

Consider the Charles River, on either side of which, in both Allston and Cambridge, there is already much good architecture to see along the banks.

On the Cambridge side stand not only Alvar Aalto's Baker House at MIT -- the Boston area's greatest modernist building of the second half of the 20th century -- but, further up, opposite Allston, the early-20th-century masterwork of Charles Coolidge: the Harvard Houses, perhaps the best Georgian-revival collegiate buildings in America. On the same bank is also Ralph Adams Cram's medieval-revival masterpiece of the mid-1930s, the Cowley Fathers Monastery.

On the Allston side, Harvard Business School is admittedly nowhere near as good as the houses on the opposite bank: the business school looks pinched in comparison. Cram used to joke that driving between them was a case of Theodore Roosevelt in Cambridge and Calvin Coolidge in Allston.

The business school has done better in our era, however.

Yes, there is that glitzy and vulgar chapel by Moshe Safdie, which would just be ludicrous if it weren't such an offensive parody of another glorious modernist landmark, Eero Saarinen's MIT Chapel. But there is also the truly outstanding work at the B-school of Kallmann, McKinnell, and Wood, whose legacy of superb architecture over the past 40-odd years in Boston includes Shad Hall, the business school's gym. It is a fine example of how the modernist aesthetic can compass the neo-Georgian and even enhance it.

Unifying both sides of the river, notably at Harvard and Boston Universities, are the striking academic towers of one of Boston's modernist masters, Jose-Luis Sert.

To all this, it is now likely we'll be able to add Renzo Piano. He, it is greatly to be hoped, will be given the opportunity of designing Harvard's proposed new Museum of Modern Art alongside the Western Avenue Bridge, Boston's need for which is so clear.

This is the context in which the Allston Library may be a very good omen. And only the beginning.

As my mind plays over the stream of architecture I've described here, I find myself hoping that Allston will hold even greater opportunities for Machado and Silvetti.

Historian and critic Douglass Shand-Tucci is the author of several books on American art and architecture and New England studies. His column appears biweekly in the Phoenix.