Blog Post No. 2012-15: Something like this (though maybe not exactly this)...

...is what your correspondent meant about Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross:

Photo 1: Existing facade of St. Paul's Cathedral, Tremont Street, Boston. Note
the blank, unfinished pediment above the columns. Copied from Architecture Boston website.

Photo 2: Selected finishing design by Philadelphia-based artist Andrew Lipski, based on the whorl of the Nautilus shell. Copied from Architecture Boston website.

Photo 3: Night view of Lipski's design. Copied from Architecture Boston website.

So, you may argue with the aesthetics and, if you have a viewpoint on the subject, the question of whether the pediment of a religious building should convey an expressly religious message directly tied to the congregation that meets within, or if an essentially aesthetic or natural subject's depiction is can itself be a subtle appeal to the existence of a deity that is the root of such beauty and order. But there is no doubt that the Epicopal Church in Massachusetts is sending a message to the broader community that it is still alive and kicking by spending considerable time and energy on presenting a new, finished face to its surroundings. The location at stake here is critical as well. St. Paul's Cathedral is located on Tremont Street, across the street from Boston Common, in the heart of the Downtown Crossing area of Boston, facing up the lower part of Beacon Hill toward the State House. A map to help RTUF Nation orient itself is here.

The decision to go with this design, made by St. Paul's with the help of MassArt, was made back in March. But it only recently came to your correspondent's attention. The essential story, which can be found on  WBUR's website, is similar in its broad outlines to the story with the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, at which we here at RTUF took a gander last year around this time. St. Paul's original builders apparently had intended for the pediment to include a sculptural depiction of St. Paul preaching to Herod Agrippa II of Judea. When funds ran short during construction in 1819, the pediment sculpture was dropped and the space where it was supposed to go has remained blank for the last 190+ years. Why fill the pediment in now? Ostensibly, it's a way of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the designation of the building as the Episcopal diocese's cathedral church. As Dean Jep Streit indicates in the WBUR story, though, the diocese is trying to do more with their decision and send a message of continuing relevancy and vitality.

Now, as to the aesthetics themselves, Bostonians have long been active in historic preservation and the architectural community's reaction was at least mixed, if not tending toward critical, at the outset, as you can see from the commentary on the Boston Society of Architects' website here and on Universal Hub. And the reasons are many why that kind of a discussion would be warranted. The design of the church is an early and excellent example of Greek Revival architecture. The architects of St. Paul's were Alexander Parris and Solomon Willard, between them responsible for two of Boston's major landmarks: Quincy Market (Parris) and the Bunker Hill Monument (Willard). The interior of the church was redesigned around its hundredth anniversary by  Ralph Adams Cram, a well-known proponent of Gothic Revival architecture whose designs include the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. You'll see that there's a bit of referencing of the "Saint John the Divine Approach" in the BSA comments, where there's some hand-wringing over the failure to complete the original design in stone sculpture, much like the way the completion of the massive Saint John's has been pursued using traditional masonry methods eschewing modern methods. St. Paul's has obviously taken a different approach with the selection of the Nautilus pediment.

In the final analysis, count me with the group who see the pediment design as worth at least a try, if not entirely appropriate. Remember that the church design is itself Greek Revival, a design aesthetic that initially had absolutely no intrinsic Christian meaning (being, you know, pre-Christian by several centuries). The artist, Donald Lipski, ably and with obvious seriousness described his design idea and meaning as follows (I am quoting in full from his own blog, which can be found here):

St. Paul’s is a house of Prayer for all People.  Carl Jung saw the spiral as the archetypal symbol of cosmic force, focusing both inward and outward.  The spiral occurred to me because it speaks to all people.  We see it in most every culture, from primitive rock carvings to the scroll of the Torah. It’s a ubiquitous form in nature—from the motion of subatomic particles to the vastness of galaxies.

The church itself gets its Greek proportions from the golden rectangle, which generates the Fibinacci spiral.  This is how the idea first came to me.  I visited the church in November, and in the Commons came upon a woman making a spiral in the leaves, and walking it back and forth like a labyrinth.  This was like a divine sign.

I’ve based it on a slice from the shell of the Chambered Nautilus, one of the Earth’s oldest creatures.  The Nautilus each year outgrows its chamber and builds a new one, which is a beautiful metaphor for spiritual growth.  Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote his great poem, The Chambered Nautilus, reflecting on just this.  He called the nautilus “The Ship of Pearl”, and I have made this the title of the sculpture.  

Here is the last stanza:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

I plan to make it look like the stone tracery on Gothic churches.  St. Paul’s was once a prominent building, but as tall office buildings have grown up around it, it has lost its impact.  Folks have felt that it looks like a bank.  I think this will change that.  I expect it will be a new and welcome landmark on Tremont St.

-Donald Lipski

How inspiring would it be if your correspondent's own Archdiocese of Boston could find within itself the resolve to finish the vertical elements of its massive Roxbury Puddingstone edifice, designed by P.C. Keely, perhaps the most prolific church architect of them all?

Blop Post No. 2012-14: What would possess us to outlaw...

...long-standing and generally satisfying built environments?

That's a question that's always begged when you see a graphic like this one, which my friend and fellow panelist Ted Brovitz included in a presentation at this past Thursday's Southern New England APA regional conference in Hartford:

Figure: Conformity/Non-conformity Map for Merrick Neighborhood,
West Springfield, MA. Credit: Ted Brovitz, Howard/Stein-Hudson.

The neighborhood shown here is the Merrick section of West Springfield, Massachusetts, which Ted described in his presentation as a typical turn-of-the-last-century mill neighborhood wedged between railroad yards on the west and the Connecticut River on the east. A substantial swath of the neighborhood was leveled by a tornado that swept through this and other parts of western Mass. a year ago last June. In addition to the tragedy of losing everything to the storm, the event also seems to have been a kind of "regulatory revelation" to the Town and the neighborhood's residents, who suddenly discovered the meaning of the image shown above.

Properties that are colored reddish-brown are non-conforming (i.e., they are currently in violation) of the minimum lot size requirement for their location as set forth in the West Springfield Zoning By-Law. Properties that are colored blue are conforming for lot size and properties that have been left white do not have sufficient information to establish whether they are conforming or non-conforming. In other words, the approximately 80-85% of the map shown in reddish-brown could not be legally rebuilt after being damaged by the tornado because the lots were too small. Without the changes to the zoning rules that Howard/Stein-Hudson has been helping the Town sort through, the owners of those properties would, in many cases, have to obtain zoning relief (possibly including variances, which would, according to the extremely strict standard in the state's zoning act, be both improperly granted and legally indefensible in virtually all cases) just to build what was there before the tornado. In other words, the Merrick neighborhood as it has stood for 100 years was quite simply outlawed by local regulation. Sounds kind of crazy, doesn't it?

Well, it isn't, at least if you understand the basic thrust of the vast majority of the zoning ordinances and by-laws that control development in our country. Put simply, almost all of these regulatory enactments were first adopted more than 50 years ago and were then premised indiscriminately and with almost no meaningful planning on auto-oriented suburban residential and commercial development. Neighborhoods like Merrick, with houses and business built in a traditional, pre-automobile form, close to the street and in a relatively tight pattern, were given the equivalent of death sentences by zoning. Whenever and however they finally succumbed, as the neighborhood ultimately did to the tornado, they simply weren't going to be allowed to come back. Luckily for Merrick (if anything in this episode can be called lucky), their calamity came after the discussion of this phenomenon has become widespread and well-understood and no longer tolerated without question. New Urbanists have long tried to raise consciousness about this issue, warning anyone who would listen that beloved places like Nantucket or Alexandria or [pick your favorite neighborhood] could not be built under today's zoning codes and were just one natural disaster away from extinction. The work in Merrick indicates that these warnings have finally made an impact.

Blog Post No. 2012-13: An interesting way to shake up the "figure-ground" view of cities

My friend and R&C colleague Dwight Merriam shot me the following link last week and I finally took a look this morning:

Odd things happen when you chop up cities and stack them sideways

It takes you to "Krulwich Wonders - an NPR Sciencey Blog," a weblog maintained by Robert Krulwich on NPR's website. Krulwich's post is a comment on the work of Armelle Caron, a French artist who has performed an act of desconstruction on a total of 6 major cities (the 2 not shown in Krulwich's post are Le Havre and Montpellier). 

The starting points here are known as "figure-ground" views of the described cities over a set area in which the buildings are solid, colored shapes and everything else is white space. I must confess that I have always enjoyed the immediate, intuitive information conveyed by figure-ground graphics, so much so that when my kids were younger and we found ourselves at the beach, I wouldn't build sand-castles but instead lay out rock and shell versions of figure-grounds (Roslindale Square was very often the subject). Figure-grounds convey, perhaps better than any other method, the way in which buildings and how they are arranged in relation to each other create or fail to create meaningful and satisfying places, and they're especially good for comparing cities:



New York Figure-Ground (Credit: Armelle Caron)



New York deconstructed (Credit: Armelle Caron) 



Istanbul Figure-Ground (Credit: Armelle Caron)



Istanbul deconstructed (Credit: Armelle Caron)

 The deconstructed version is also interesting, and the method of laying out the separated pieces is obviously an art, not a science. Interesntigly, Krulwich's vote for most interesting deconstruction goes to Istanbul, and he indicates almost-disappointment with New York. I must say I'm not entirely with Krulwich that the city of my birth comes off that badly, especially considering that if the area shown were dropped another half mile or so, it would show more variety since it would take in all of Lower Manhattan.

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. 2012-11: No, we didn't just imagine it...

...Mitt Romney really was a strong proponent of Smart Growth when he was Governor of Massachusetts

For what it's worth, your faithful correspondent is a praiser of vibrant urban places at least in part for the same reason I'm a registered Democrat - I was born and raised that way. I also happen to truly love cities and hold progressive political opinions, so it's not as if I categorize myself unwillingly. In other words, at some level, we simply are who we are (for reasons both in our control and outside of it) and we need to admit it.

How, then, are we to understand the whiplash-inducing spectacle of position-reversal that is the campaign of Mitt Romney as the Republican Party's nominee for president of the United States? Because it's not just his positions on things like health care that have swung so far to the right as he has pursued the presidency that you begin to wonder if the present campaign is really more like a schizophrenic battle of present-day Romney against Romney circa 2002-2006 than it is Romney against the incumbent. No, indeed. Romney also very warmly embraced Smart Growth, which is now so totally anathema to his party that it has been associated with the unholy trinity of the U.N., black helicopters and one-world-ism. This was true during both the 2002 gubernatorial campaign and Romney's administration, and well do I remember it. And thankfully my recollection is confirmed by an insightful piece - "Romney, once an anti-sprawl crusader, created model for Obama 'Smart Growth' program" - posted earlier this year by Lisa Hymas at Grist.org. Go check it out. As the quotes from Doug Foy and Anthony Flint suggest, Romney's support for Smart Growth really did have a kind of "Is he for real?" quality to them. Nothing, at least nothing publicly known, that he had done or said before the 2002 campaign suggested that Smart Growth was a major issue for him. But he and his administration really made some real progress on it while he was governor. And, given his silence on the issue, one can now only assume that he shares his party's revulsion for the entire notion, let alone its implementation as policy. The whole thing would be amusing if we didn't actually need Smart Growth (or whatever alternative name people would like to apply to it, whether that's sustainable development, traditional neighborhoods, walkable neighborhoods, or any combination of those terms and others) so desperately for a whole host of reasons.

RTUF Note: This post was updated since its original posting to improve readability and correct certain phrasing. - MJL

Blog Post No. 2012-10: Sacred Heart Parish takes care of its physical assets...

...both sacred and profane

The Photos:

Photo 1: One of the church's interior stations of the cross, recently restored.

Photo 2: The restored exterior niche statue.

Photo 3: The repaired slate roof.

Photo 4: The re-sided rectory.

The Location: 169 Cummins Highway, Roslindale, MA (MAP)

Years of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2007-2012.

The Story: We're in Roslindale again, this time at Sacred Heart Parish. For those keeping score at home, we are also back to restorative actions similar to the May entry about Community Boating down on the Charles River. In this case, Sacred Heart has undertaken a series of repairs and renovations over a five-year period under the heading of "Project Slate." [You can see the pre-existing general exterior condition of the church and rectory in the google streetview available at the map link above.] The fundraising campaign kicked off in 2006, and in relatively short order, the necessary funds were gathered. Construction then began, first with, you guessed it, a new slate roof over the entire church building, followed by repainting of the interior of the upper church (like most urban Catholic churches built in the massive wave of European immigration of the second half of the 19th century, the church has both an upper church and a lower church which in an earlier era held multiple Sunday masses each), repointing the exterior brick work and the main exterior stairway, and re-siding of the rectory. After some additional fundraising and patience, the stations of the cross were also completely restored (after two were initially restored early on).

One relatively unheralded change was the removal of the old, badly-stained and unfortunate-looking plexiglass that covered the niche statue of Jesus with the Sacred Heart. As you can see in photo 2, that statue is now back in the open air with the heart itself painted red as is most common. Why and when the statue was encased in plexiglass is not known to your correspondent. But I will say that the removal of the plexiglass is one of those relatively small but highly symbolic events that cumulatively add up to an urban fabric that is functioning and telling its participants that there is confidence in the durability and significance of its various components. The restoration of the stations of the cross is another such action that means more than simply putting gold leaf where it belongs (though as you can see from Photo 1, it's an impressive piece of work). Again, I don't know why and when these stations were painted entirely white (which was their state just before the recent restoration). Yet they were, a poor decision whose reversal required raising relatively substantial funds just to have stations that express the artist's original intent. It's a cliche, I admit, but the cumulative urban fabric effect of Project Slate is greater than the sum of its parts.

Blog Post No. 2012-9: Arboretum Place establishes a strong northern gateway for Roslindale...

... and begins the evolution of Forest Hills

Photo 1: Arboretum Place from the south.

Photo 2: Looking across Washington Street at the southern building corner.

Photo 3: Looking across Washington Street at the northern end of the building's facade.

Photo 4: Looking south on Washington Street.

Photo 5: The finished product.

The Location: Arboretum Place (Washington Street), Jamaica Plain, MA (MAP).

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2012.

The Story: Or is this more accurately described as the southern gateway to Jamaica Plain? I must say that I've always thought of this particular location as being part of God's Country (a.k.a, Roslindale), but I stand corrected. Regardless, this is a very good piece of work by everyone involved, running from the City of Boston (and its Forest Hills Planning Initiative) and the MBTA (owners of these sliver parcels along what was to have been the Southwest Expressway) to the neighboring community and the developer, WCI Realty, and their design team, including extremely local player Vozzella Design Group (whose office is literally two doors down from here). The building will be oriented tightly toward the street, with retail uses on the entire first floor and parking located on either side instead of between the building on the front lot line. It's going to be a strong presence at this location.

I will also confess both (1) that I'm jumping the gun slightly (in that the project is not yet complete), and (2) that this isn't technically about "restoring" the urban fabric here because, truth be told (at least according to our friend George Bromley and his series of atlases from the late 19th and early 20th centuries), this is the first time a building has been placed on this particular location. As you can see from Bromley's 1884 and 1923 maps, this space between intersecting railroad lines (today's Amtrak/MBTA mainline on the east and the MBTA's Needham Heights branch on the west) has previously lain unused despite development nearby. The anchor tenant for the retail is going to be Harvest Co-op, a natural and organic foods grocer that has a location not far away on South Street in JP as well as in Cambridge. The space here will be a big step up for them (according to the Jamaica Plain Gazette, at about 8700 square feet, it's double the size of the current JP store) and you may well find your RTUF correspondent shopping there from time to time once it opens.

Forest Hills generally appears on the verge of rapid evolution from a kind of afterthought at the edge of two neighborhoods lying underneath the Casey Overpass to a destination in its own right. Once completed and occupied, Arboretum Place should play a major role in moving this gateway to the southwestern section of Boston forward.

The Not-RTUF Sketch: The developers of Arboretum Place have a definitive plan view of the development on their website (the building profiled here is the larger one in the center of the sketch), so no need for RTUF to reinvent this particular wheel: