Whitehill's Law

Millennium Partners' controversial Back Bay tower will be a boon to Boston. What should be disturbing is the ongoing vulgarization of Copley Square. It's not height or density that matters, but design.

by Douglass Shand-Tucci

SKYLINE

News from the Back Bay. Bad news. It's time to tell the powers that be in Boston's most prestigious quarter that they haven't got a clue.

They're all up in arms against the building Millennium Partners has proposed for Mass Ave at Boylston Street, a project designed to renew and transform that ugliest of cityscapes. Even if it only half succeeds, it cannot help but improve in-town Boston's closest equivalent to East Berlin. Meanwhile, nobody seems to be minding the store in Copley Square, that most beautiful of streetscapes, a place celebrated everywhere for its architecture, yet soon to be badly trashed.

Why is everybody looking the wrong way?

It is the size of the Millennium complex, known as Boylston Square, that's scaring them. The fear is that, first, the new center's density will generate too much congestion. Another worry is that the skyscraper at the project's heart is too big at 59 stories -- tall for Boston.

Both fears seem to me not only irrational but dangerous. They bode ill not just for the Back Bay but for Boston in general.

Now, I'm well aware that these fears speak to some legitimate issues: street-level access, parking, infrastructure strain, and so on -- issues space does not permit full discussion of in this column. But these issues need to be addressed more positively.

How many stop to consider that whatever the total capacity of all of Boylston Square's planned movie theaters, it is unlikely that it will even equal the number of seats lost just in my lifetime to uptown Boston, which used to have a galaxy of theaters, often running films in tandem with the downtown theaters? Remember the Loew's State, the Fenway, the Fine Arts, the Exeter, the Capri, the Esquire, the Strand, and the Uptown? I suspect there are more filmgoers living in the Back Bay and the South End today (who would walk to and from the movies) than there were in the '60s and '70s.

It was just such a fear of congestion, you'll recall, that lost us I.M. Pei's magnificent glass pyramid, now a landmark of a greatly revitalized Paris, where it stands in the Great Court of the Louvre.

It should, of course, be glittering along the banks of the Charles as the centerpiece of the Kennedy Library, for which it was designed. Before, that is, our Brattle Street betters ran that institution out of Cambridge and into Dorchester for fear of the hordes -- which, by the way, have never materialized.

Having signaled my own opinion up front, let me call some witnesses.

For the traffic question in cities generally, I'll call the Globe's Robert Campbell, a long-time observer of change and growth in Boston. I don't know what Campbell's views on the Millennium project are, but in his Cityscapes of Boston, he has cited our very unhappy experience of "pedestrianized" streets (the malling of the city, I call it), protesting that "removing the colorful moving cars from American streets was like stripping the bright rotating toys from a baby's crib." The problem, writes Campbell, is that when cars were banished, "sensory deprivation ensued. Planners had forgotten that congestion is a virtue, not a vice, of cities, and that most American downtowns have too little of it, not too much."

The emphasis is mine. I find myself thinking of Newbury Street on a Friday evening. Does anyone think fewer cars would enhance that lively urban scene? And how about all those traffic snarls (complete with mounted police to make them worse -- but, surely, more exciting too) at gala opening nights in the Theater District or at Symphony Hall? I'd sooner loose the Klieg lights than the traffic congestion.

On the corollary issue of urban planning, I'll call George Thrush, head of the architecture program at Northeastern University. "A radical leap forward in reconnecting our city" is the way he sees the Millennium project, which he feels would "repair the street corridors between Newbury and Boylston Streets along Massachusetts Avenue and . . . re-attach strands of our `walking city' at a point where the Turnpike and railroad sliced them apart."

Notice the similarity, as Thrush sees it, to what we're trying to do in the Big Dig, which aims to re-attach the North End and the waterfront downtown.

The most interesting aspect for me of Thrush's view, however, is that he also sees the aesthetic aspect so many miss. The skyscraper at the heart of Boylston Square, writes Thrush, will

offer an excellent terminal view looking west on Boylston and mark a grand entry to the city. This kind of judicious use of slender towers as markers for different districts in Boston could serve as a model for future development in other parts of town.

I could not agree more.

Awesomely poised and elegantly proportioned, the Millennium tower, designed by Blake Middleton of Gary Edward Handel and Partners of New York, is the best sort of urbanism, just as it is the best sort of architecture. As Rodolfo Machado might say, it is contextualism cast in the language not of historicism but of modernism.

The design brings to mind the teachings of a third witness, Boston's pre-eminent historian and preservationist in this century, Walter Muir Whitehill.

If you have the sense every time someone starts on the "ghastly" Millennium tower that you've heard it all before, you have -- about the Hancock Tower. The naysayers were wrong then, and they're wrong now.

Listen to Whitehill, and when you do, remember that this was the man who in the 1960s saved the Back Bay for us all. It was Whitehill who arranged for the exhibition "The City as a Work of Art" at the Museum of Fine Arts, and who made possible the publication by Harvard University Press of Bainbridge Bunting's seminal book on the area's Victorian townhouses. It was Whitehill, too, who instigated the creation of the original Back Bay Historic District. And what the father of preservation in the Back Bay had to say about the Hancock Tower is just my point about Boylston Square.

Faced then with the prospect of "the tallest building in New England rising beside Trinity Church," a far more sensitive site than the Millennium proposal's today, Whitehill pointed to the Hancock's architecture: I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb, he wrote in the second edition of Boston: A Topographical History, showed "great imagination" in that design. And as for the tower's height -- "To me," wrote Whitehill, "at least one slender 60-story tower clutters the skyline less than three 20-story buildings or four of 15."

Whitehill's Law, I'm willing to call it. It's not height nor density that matters, but design. It's so obvious. But how little we heed it. And nowhere are the disastrous results more readily seen than in Copley Square itself.

The Hancock's design, Whitehill felt, would "enhance the local scene, rather than detract from and dominate it," and so it does. But notice what does not enhance Copley Square -- what, in fact, detracts from it badly.

There's that revolting black-and-gold office building on the corner of Boylston and Clarendon; its equally tacky red-brick neighbor; the hideous green-and-white Hayden Building on the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth; and, even more repulsive, 1 Exeter Place, a block further up at Boylston and Exeter. This last is so loathsome a structure it has aptly been nicknamed the Darth Vader building.

Copley Square has indeed been marred. But by its smallest and lowest buildings, not by its biggest and tallest.

Even the Hancock's not without flaw, of course; it has its faults just as surely as the Millennium tower will. Though perhaps it's worth recalling that in the case of the Hancock its flaws are, as the French say, the weaknesses of its strengths. There is the wind; there are the shadows; but oh, the glory of it.

Copley Square seems not just to survive the hordes it generates, but to be a more lively urban scene because of them.

Trinity Church, too, profits from the Hancock. The architectural splendors of church and tower play off each other so well that it's hard to find a Boston guide or tourist map -- or a history of American architecture -- that doesn't celebrate the fact.

It's the Boston Public Library that is about to get a horrific neighbor: the soon-to-be-erected Trinity Place tower on Blagdon Street, beside the library. While so many are fixated on Boylston Square, it is this building that will do the real damage.

If you want to see what's going to happen, walk up Boylston Street to Fairfield, where stand two pertinent buildings. One (actually inspired by the Copley Square library) is the Hynes Convention Center, one of Boston's grandest modernist public buildings; the other, the Prudential Center mall, one of Boston's more conspicuous essays in postmodernism, is all gush and glitz, very much in the manner of the projected Trinity Place. It's quite a case study. Worth the walk. And a brief meditation on postmodern architecture.

The measure of postmodernism (the worst of it, which is to say nearly all of it) has been best taken, to my mind, by Alan Tempko, the architecture critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, whose view is the more refreshing for its freewheeling West Coast perspective.

Tempko has railed against the stage-set "fakery," the "vulgar flash of the detailing," the typically "hot palette" of strident colors, the frequently "conflicting lines and clamorous details," and, most pointedly of all, "the reactionary sentimentality" of what he calls, unequivocally, "the architectural counterpart of Reaganism in politics."

Prepare yourself. Trinity Place, I predict, is going to be a stellar example, whether or not it will boast the synthetic materials, stagy faux finishes, and general decorative excess so characteristic of this type of work. You can depend upon it, for so it discloses itself in the published drawings: Trinity Place is stridently massed and crassly detailed, and is as vulgar as the Boston Public Library is refined.

Schlock architecture? Wait until you see Trinity Place's companion piece at 111 Huntington Avenue, which will affect I.M. Pei and Araldo Cossutta's magnificent Christian Science Center in ways that make me cringe. Even on paper, the design of this 36-story tower yields that hollow feeling you get when you've looked too long at -- nothing.

The real question is why Boston, after nearly two centuries at the head of American architecture, is still so welcoming of such stuff.

Boston's elite design firms will have nothing to do with it. You won't, for example, find it on offer by Schwartz/Silver (the designers of the new addition to the New England Aquarium) or Lears Weinzapfel (Dewey Square's MBTA operation center). Yet the market for PoMo survives here, I'm told, as it does nowhere else but Kuwait City. With that possible exception -- and Las Vegas, of course -- I wonder whether upper Huntington Avenue is rapidly turning into the nation's capital of architectural schlock.

Yes, the developers (in the case of Trinity Place and 111 Huntington Avenue the Raymond Property Company and media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman's Boston Properties, respectively) deserve their share of the blame. Ditto Boston's design review board.

But whatever was the story with Trinity Place and 111 Huntington, the name each building wears is unequivocally that of CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares.

It is an architectural firm that, before it began to do increasingly problematic large-scale commercial work in the early 1990s, had distinguished itself over the years, especially for superb adaptive reuse of historic structures. The architects' credits in the Back Bay alone include the Ames-Webster House; the former Exeter Street Theater; and Louis, Boston. Even now they are restoring the long-missed tower to Harvard's Memorial Hall.

CBT has also done some fine new small-scale work, ranging from the Charles River Park Synagogue to the recent Nike store on Newbury at Exeter, a handsome building that manages to be sensitive to its site without cloning any of its neighbors in the usual approved fashion hereabouts.

Furthermore, one of the principals, Richard Bertman, is among the nicest men you'd ever want to know. Did I forget to say that his partner Tseckares is the current president of the Boston Society of Architects?

You get the picture, I'm sure. But none of it, though it adds to irony, holds out any hope at all for Copley Square.

The area's so hot now that architectural quality hardly matters, I guess. Just last week, the Boston Business Journal reported of Trinity Place (in a page-one story) that "buyers are already queuing for units that are being sold for as much as $4 million a piece. An au pair suite can be thrown in for an extra $400,000." Although the steel frame is only just now rising, the Journal reports that "close to 40 percent of the multimillion-dollar units have been snapped up by buyers."

By way of explanation, a local civic leader volunteered to the Journal that "there is nothing like having a front lawn that is Copley Square."

And that, of course, is why it's not a case of so much money for so little architecture. Trinity Place will be a good deal for its residents, whose view, after all, will be of Trinity Church.

It's the rest of us I worry about.

Historian and critic Douglass Shand-Tucci is the author of several books on American art and architecture and New England studies.