Whither the Innovation District...

...or the rare occasion on which Robert Campbell goes a bit overboard.

The Place:



Credit: seaportinnovationdistrict.com.

The Article: This is another in our series of reviewing what certain key regional media outlets (usually The Boston Globe) are saying about the urban scene (a.k.a., They-report-it-and-we-give-it-the-once-over). This time around we're back to weblog inspiration Robert Campbell, who recently took on the evolving state of urban design affairs in the Innovation District and found it sorely lacking in Innovation District needs a human touch. There's a fair amount of truth in what Campbell says, but from my perspective we need to remember that, for all of the faults identified, we're trading 50+ years of surface parking use for much, much improved urban fabric and the district is only partially built out. Reserving judgment is almost always the better path. And the reference to office parks in suburban Dallas feels unnecessary and gratuitous - there is plenty of office park terrain right here in eastern Massachusetts to provide a point of comparison. Perhaps the most far-reaching and ultimately non-recoverable mistake was allowing the street network to be dictated by then-EOT on an effectively superblock/suburban arterial model that puts the really fine-grained urban fabric of places like Beacon Hill or the North End out of reach. Campbell is also right about the highlights (especially Independence Wharf and the park at D Street) and the real lowlight, which is Seaport Boulevard, the district's main drag. Giving Seaport Boulevard a better treatment than overwide travel lanes and concrete paved medians would be a huge step in the right direction and one that should be taken sooner rather than later.

Blog Post No. 2014-12.

It's really way past time to reduce the amount of space allocated to cars on Franklin Street near Downtown Crossing...

...a.k.a. the long-awaited Installment No. 2 in your humble weblog's series on Targeting New Urban Fabric Restoration

The Photos:

View 1: Looking down Franklin St. from Otis St. toward P.O. Square.



View 2: Looking up Franklin St. toward Washington St. and the Filene's site construction.

View 3: Looking back down Franklin St. from Hawley Pl.

The Location: Franklin Street, near Downtown Crossing, Boston, MA.

The Back Story: We'll get to the main course soon enough, but for starters the building on the right in View 2 and just to the left in View 3 was featured in Cityscapes of Boston as an example of shifting tastes in architectural style. It seems this buidling, built in the early 1870s in the post-great fire period, was covered in the late 1950s with Shea Stadium-style multicolored panels by its then-owner, First Federal Savings Bank, as a symbol of hip modernism. Thirty years later, that era's hip modernism was rejected when the successor financial institution, Northeast Savings, scraped it back off and restored the facade. So, a nice story there and a happy ending.

But this is downtown Boston, friends, and there is almost always more than one layer to consider. As Robert Campbell noted in his Cityscapes write-up, this is also where Charles Bulfinch established the "Tontine Crescent," a legendary grouping of Federal rowhouses that included a widened Franklin Street and a small enclosed garden with a "classical urn." Constructed in the 1790s, Robert reported that this assemblage was demolished in 1858 and the classical urn moved to Bulfinch's grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery. The following image, taken from wikipedia, doesn't seem to have the detail required to do the project justice -- per Robert, inspired, as it was, by "the crescents of Bath, England, [it] must have been one of the great urban groups in Boston's history."

View 4: The Tontine Crescent pre-demolition.

All that's left of this historic development and its small green space today are the cylindrical planters and forlorn modernist sculpture in View 1. It ain't pretty.

The Bottom Line: And what's even less pretty is the way there is just way too much space devoted to the automobile and way too little space devoted to us humans on foot, particularly here in the pedestrian heart of Boston. Maybe part of the problem is that this has long been the transition space between the Financial District centered around Post Office Square and the historic commerical core at Downtown Crossing. But that's all in flux now. Both districts are changing, especially Downtown Crossing, which has been steadily adding housing units and will experience another significant jump in the number of residents when the residential high-rise on the non-historic half of the Filene's site is completed and occupied sometime in the next couple years.

Franklin Street at this location in its present state is simply not pulling its weight. There's really hardly any automobile traffic, certainly not enough to remotely justify all the pavement, running, as it does, into an effective dead-end for everyone but taxis and buses at Hawley Street. So, here's your proposal -- give this street a road diet, reduce it by at least a lane of traffic and give that lane (I vote for the right-hand side of the street in View 2) to a much wider sidewalk that would allow for sidewalk dining at the adjacent restaurants. Franklin Street lies in Boston's pedestrian heart. It's time to give more space where space is due.

And here's an RTUF sketch (a little late arriving) of the proposal:

(Blog Post No. 2014-6)

Blog Post No. 2012-12: Making the Hynes behave on Boylston Street

Photo 1: Looking east on Boylston Street, Hynes in the midground, and
the Hancock Tower in the far background.



Photo 2: Looking diagonally across Boylston Street, at Hynes' NW corner
and The Capital Grille.



Photo 3: towne restaurant, at the NE corner of the Hynes
Convention Center (sorry for the delivery trucks).

Photo 4: The eastward facing entrance of towne, shot from the
sidewalk in front of the courtyard adjacent.

Photo 5: The courtyard adjacent, with towne's outdoor seating.

The Location: 900 Boylston Street, Boston (Back Bay), MA.

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2010.

The Story: We have spent no insignificant amount of time and digital ink here at RTUF talking about the many changes, large and small, that have been made over the last decade at the Prudential Center (of which the Hynes Convention Center is not technically a part, though it is directly adjacent), including in both Blog Post No. 2009-3: The Mandarin Oriental Hotel (discussing the Mandarin's success in replacing what had been a particularly lifeless cluster of auto access drives along Boylston Street between Essex and Fairfield Streets), and Blog Post No. 2010-21: Seizing the presently available opportunity to continue the campaign to bring the Pru out to meet its neighbors... (highlighting a then-proposed residential rental tower that filled in a major gap along Essex Street, and also pointing to the still-proposed 888 Boylston Street tower that would fill in the last plaza space next to towne as well as several other changes around the complex's perimeter such as 111 Huntington, the Belvidere residences, and the two-story section along Huntington to which Shaw's supermarket was moved). It has been an impressive string of improvements, and one to which Cityscapes of Boston itself pointed with anticipation even as far back as 1992. After lamenting the "wasteland of grim towers and empty plazas" by which "Boston's Prudential Center blights everything around it," Robert Campbell expressed hope at the then-new ownership's plans for "filling the worst of its dead plazas with new shops and offices," concluding that "[i]f all goes well, the Pru may some day be a revitalizing agent for the very street frontage it now kills." (pp. 208-209)

That day can now be said to have fully arrived, two decades on. So much so that even publicly-owned buildings are getting in on the act. Your RTUF correspondent will stipulate that we are looking in this case at a fairly subtle, kind of small bore change to the formerly long, blank Boylston Street frontage of the Hynes Convention Center. For our non-Boston readers, the Hynes is the erstwhile main convention center for the Boston region that ultimately became too small and was replaced by the massive Boston Convention and Exposition Center (or "BCEC") out in what is now the Innovation District in South Boston. (Of course, there's already a proposal floating to expand the BCEC beyond its current footprint because it is already in danger of becoming too small itself, less than 10 years after it was completed (!), but I digress...)

Now, to return to the Hynes and the subject of this blog post. The convention center authority has retained the Hynes and kept it operating as a venue for smaller conventions and meetings that don't compete with the BCEC. At least one source from around the time of towne's opening ("towne makes Hynes tastier") indicated that the authority's impetus for bringing in both towne and The Capital Grille was to improve dining options for visitors/convention-goers. I also suspect that part of the discussion around keeping the Hynes open after the BCEC came online might have included running some numbers and trying to figure out a way to enhnace non-event revenue, including from such things as then underutilized space along the Boylston Street frontage. Whatever the reason, the insertion of both restaurants within the existing footprint of the building at its two corners was a very good move. No, not earthshattering, but a smart decision and one recognizing a couple of key imperatives in creating a workable urban fabric: first, avoid long blank walls along important street frontages, whatever is going on behind them, and second, pay special attention to corners. The result is that this stretch of Boylston now has activity on both sides of the street, something that almost has never been the case (recall that before the Pru was built, there were extensive railroad yards all the way from Mass. Ave. to Dartmouth St.), but which Campbell rightly pointed out in Cityscapes (at p. 208) is critical for a successful commercial street, though being located opposite the Hynes was never quite as bad as being located opposite the un-reconstructed Pru's plazas. Note also that both restaurants have extensive outdoor seating, which used to be dismissed in Boston as simply incompatible with a region that has as long a winter season as we typically do, but is now recognized as a highly desirable amenity for any urban eatery.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric:

Blog Post No. 2011-17: What do you think it would take...

...to appropriately cap off Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross?

Photo 1: Front facade of the cathedral. 

Photo 2: Close view of the lower front facade tower.

Photo 3: A side view of the front facade,
showing the low caps on the towers.

Photo 4: The north side facade at the transept.

Photo 5: View looking south along Washington Street,
with Cathedral High School gym just in front of cathedral.

Photo 6: Plaque on the front facade of the cathedral,
referencing the importance of the building to
newly-arrived Irish immigrants in the mid 19th century.

The Comment: As you can see from the photos, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, although it's been open and in operation since 1875, was never quite "completed" to the design of P.C. Keeley, despite the plaque's statement to the contrary. It is very obviously missing the spires that should rise from the two towers on either side of the front facade. And so, RTUF's question today is as indicated above: What would it take to appropriately cap off those towers? And I mean that question both architecturally and practically. What should they look like -- traditional Gothic spires in the spirit of the original design (shown directly below, and, at least according to the accompanying account, planned to reach 200 and 300 feet in height, respectively), or something more modern? And practically, how would the archdiocese, no longer flush with cash or the level of influence and good will it used to enjoy in Boston, pull it off in the first place?

Source: Boston Illustrated, 1881.

Now, this question occurs to me because I've spent several hours last Saturday and today attending mass at the Cathedral. I have done this not because the Cathedral is convenient to our house in Roslindale or because I'm looking for a new parish. Rather, my son's choir (based from the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School at St. Paul's Church in Cambridge) has sung at masses there the last two weekends. [Regular readers may recall that I blogged about the very flexible courtyard space at St. Paul's church earlier this year in Post No. 2011-2.]

So, I've spent more time there in the last 8 days than I've spent there in the last 14 years of living in the Boston area. Even as a pretty diligent, church-going Catholic, I'm not surprised. The Cathedral, almost since the day of its completion, appears to have occupied something of a disfavored place in the life and self-concept of the Boston archdiocese. This seems partly the result of its location in the South End, which was eclipsed as the most fashionable residential neighborhood in the city shortly after its completion when the filling and construction of the Back Bay got underway in the 1860s. It also seems partly the result of the leadership of the archdiocese's decision to affirmatively achieve the disconnect by decamping for Lake Street on the Brighton-Newton border starting in the 1880s. Under Archbishop Williams, the chancery (the central administrative offices), the archdiocesan seminary, and the archbishop's residence were all located out on the former Stanwood Estate by the turn of the last century, several miles from the place where worship was supposed to be centered. When Boston College, the region's most important Catholic higher educational institution, moved from its former location on Harrison Avenue (also in the South End and not far from the Cathedral) to an assemblage across Commonwealth Avenue from the archdiocese's new compound in the first decade of the 20th century, the relocation of Catholic Boston's power and attention was complete. I'd be curious to know if there is another example anywhere in the Catholic Church -- worldwide -- where the cathedral was so completely abandoned and cut off from the leadership of the diocese. The only thing the leadership appears to have left behind was Cathedral High School (the school gym is seen in Photo 5). And, then in the early 20th century, injury was added to insult as the elevated Orange Line was built down Washington Street, resulting in what Robert Campbell called "A Cathedral Trapped Behind an Iron Fence" in Cityscapes of Boston. So much, then, for the building that was supposed to be the main marker for the fully-arrived Catholic community in Boston.

But the tides against which the Cathedral swam for many decades seem to be receding, at least in some directions. As Campbell noted in Cityscapes, the elevated Orange Line was torn down in the 1980s when the subway was relocated to a new alignment in the Southwest Corridor. The South End has become a far more fashionable and desired urban neighborhood in the last several decades. Washington Street itself has substantially recoverd, as new construction to the north of the Cathedral has filled in major gaps in the urban fabric and the MBTA, City of Boston, and the Commonwealth recently collaborated on a reconstruction of the thoroughfare that improved the streetscape and provided for reserved bus lanes for the Silver Line's southern segment (they're the red-painted lanes seen in Photo 5). The archdiocese itself has undergone a major transformation as a result of several trends over the last half century, including, most significantly, the twin traumas of parish closings/consolidations and the clergy abuse scandal that directly led to selling off most of the old Lake Street complex to Boston College as a way to shore up the archdiocese's finances. The current archbishop and cardinal, Sean O'Malley, now resides next to the Cathedral (a move your faithful correspondent heartily applauds), while the chancery has been moved to suburban office space in Braintree and the seminary remains in Brighton.

Accordingly, a new day has, in many ways, arrived in the archdiocese and we are all -- leadership, clergy, laity -- feeling our way through it. It seems, to at least this observer, that one tremendously important symbol of really starting a new era might be to complete unfinished business with what remains, at least spiritually, the most important building in the archdiocese's built heritage. Why not give the old edifice something new to make it really stand out? Why not figure out a way to have the towers (however conceived) finally reach into the sky the way they were meant? Why not announce that the archdiocese really and truly is back, in and of the City?

Editor's Note: This post has been edited for flow and to correct spelling and punctuation since its original posting. -- MJL

Blog Post No. 2010-22: Robert Campbell writes about the MFA's new wing...

...and RTUF likes what it hears and has already seen over there in recent years

Regular RTUFers may recall (OK, if you're like me, maybe you don't actually recall anything unless you write it down someplace or you're specifically reminded) that I wrote a little bit about the series of initial, relatively subtle but still urban design-influential changes going on over at the Museum of Fine Arts back in July (Update to Blog Post No. 2010-14). That, of course, was while the museum's new wing -- showcasing its Art of the Americas collection -- was still under construction. That wing is now complete and open to the public. In true celebration, at least from this blogger's perspective, we have Robert Campbell's return to the pages of the Boston Globe in a too-brief but typically insightful review of the wing's architecture from a week ago Saturday in a piece entitled "A wing that works." Soon enough, I'll take myself over to the MFA and be able to write back on whether the interior galleries and other spaces deserve the high praise that Robert gives them. For now, though, putting aside his verdict that the exterior doesn't really do much, I'd like to focus on two points from his piece, the first relatively minor, the second a big deal for RTUF given our focus here on urban design:

FIRST, the subtitle of the article is

"The beauty of the MFA's expansion is how it showcases the art without calling attention to itself."

And in this, Robert is exactly on the money, contrasting the design by Foster + Partners with Gehry's splashy Bilbao Guggenheim, which is posited as the start of "starchitects" around the globe drawing more attention to museum buildings than the works of art they are meant to house and display. Of course, being from New York, and this is my relatively minor point, I would go back to Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the original Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue in New York as a mid-20th century example of that precise phenomenon. Who thought that a museum could look like a giant toilet bowl?! How novel! How interesting! How disorienting to try to look at art on a spiraling, slanted walkway! How different from everything around it! Exactly right and an example of the phenomenon of a Modernist building's essentially anti-urban character being saved by the incredibly strong urban fabric all around it. The Guggenheim in New York is definitely an icon. Does it provide a comfortable and fitting home for the art it's meant to house and display? I've been there a number of times. I'm not convinced, even with the high-rise tower completed several years ago completing Wright's original design.

SECOND, Robert is at his best in the piece when talks about how the new wing represents the culmination of the MFA's now long-running effort to undo some pretty awful building access and layout decisions from the last quarter of the last century:

Finally, for the first time in my experience, it's now possible to figure out where you are in the MFA. Since the opening of the museum's West Wing in 1981, designed by noted architect I.M. Pei, that's been almost impossible. Most visitors entered through the Pei wing at the extreme end of the museum and quickly got lost in what seemed to be disorder.

The first thing Foster + Partners did was study the floor plan of the original MFA of 1909, by architect Guy Lowell. Lowell's plan, like much traditional architecture, was based on the human body. You entered at the head, and the building wings spread out symmetrically to the left and right like arms. It's a kind of order we grasp intuitively.

Foster has restored that old order. The Pei entry will be now used only for bus groups. The rest of us will again enter the museum at its center, either from the Fenway or from Huntington Avenue. A spine of visitor services — ticketing, tourist shop, information — now connects those two entrances.


To help you further with your wayfinding, openings between galleries tend to be lined up with one another, creating long vistas you can look or walk down. It’s an effect that was called Parade Rooms in an earlier era. The vistas let you see one part of the museum from another. They lace everything together visually. Often, for further legibility, the curators and architects site an especially bold or famous artwork at the termination of a vista.

I fully agree with Robert's comment that the old way of entering the museum at the extreme end of one side was a conceptually sub-par experience for every single visitor forced to endure it. The contrast with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York -- with its grand staircase and entrance hall welcoming visitors and giving them an immediate point of reference -- could not have been more obvious. A link here to the MFA's new floor plans would be useful in seeing what Robert means in terms of the museum's access points and layout now being much more intuitive than before. Similarly, the below RTUF sketch tries to highlight the exterior changes at work here -- the original entrances facing on Huntington Avenue and The Fenway have been reopened and re-emphasized, the parking lot entrance has, as Robert describes, been de-emphasized and is now only to be used for groups, and Forsyth Way is getting a much needed facelift now that the museum is more open to that side of its exterior.

Much of the credit obviously goes to Foster + Partners and their local team members, CBT, for getting the precise vision, execution, and details right. But I think substantial credit also needs to go to Malcolm Rogers, who has been the museum's director for the last decade-and-a-half. I will plead total ignorance on his stewardship of the museum's collections and whether he is a tyrant or a genius, or perhaps both. There is no denying, however, that it has been on his watch that the MFA has raised the funds, spent the design effort, and made the physical changes both small and large that have opened the MFA to the broader community -- both physically and symbolically -- in a way that it arguably has never been. This is a point recently made in, of all places, the Boston Phoenix, which featured an extensive cover article by Greg Cook entitled "OMFG: The new MFA " and a spot-on editorial about Rogers headlined "Mister Rogers: The MFA's Impresario." The Phoenix's editors say of the new wing and Rogers:

In the most expansive sense, the Art of the Americas Wing, while self-contained, operates in service to the larger MFA. It provides the well-established collections with room to breath properly and re-establishes a harmonious flow among the staggering number of older galleries.


The idea of service is the glue that binds Rogers's 16-year tenure. In the past, the MFA was run as something of a private preserve that just happened to be open to the public.


The degree to which this was true may have varied from department to department, but the old MFA was a collection of fiefdoms that only appeared to operate in concert the farther away you viewed it.


Rogers, with varying degrees of skill and success, has managed to recast the MFA into a multi-disciplinary whole dedicated to internal growth and institutional survival by serving the public.

Wherever the truth lies in Rogers's role in brining the museum's staff and collections to a new level, there can be no doubting that the MFA is a much better piece of the urban fabric today than it has been in a long, long time, perhaps ever.

UPDATE (23 Dec 2010): Good friend and fellow runner Professor Matt Noonan called me out recently for writing about something that I hadn't gone and seen (at least not in its finished state), so herewith are some pictures of the exterior of the new wing that your faithful RTUF correspondent took very recently. Once the holiday craziness dies down, we'll actually go inside and let you know what we think of the interior.

A note on the photos: They run effectively in order from the Huntington Avenue facade around Forsyth Way and onto the Fenway, ending up looking at the West Wing across the surface parking lot referred to above.

UPDATE (24 Jan 2011): Well, over the weekend, we finally got a look inside the new wing and see how the museum works in its new, expanded form. Put simply, everything Robert Campbell said was true. The MFA works and makes much more sense now. The new galleries do a great job of showcasing the MFA's strengths in American art, and showing, by the dearth of space given over to South and Central America, where it needs improvement. I recall that Campbell was not entirely sure how well the new main space would work: I think it works just fine. I don't know whether it really needs more art work to be placed in it to give it more interest. You can see that one end is held up quite well by the former exterior of the original museum, and at least in mid-winter, you can see the (snow-covered) greenery on either side. Ending with some photos of that space: