building was designed by Benjamin Thompson to house Design Research, his pioneering retail enterprise that introduced European modern design products to American consumers. Essentially a glass display case, the building now houses a Crate & Barrel shop.

Sert lured Le Corbusier to Harvard in 1961 to design his only U.S. building: the sculptural set piece known as the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (1963). Although wedged into a lot too small for its ambitions as a swirling pavilion, it remains one of the most poetic buildings on the campus. “The Carpenter Center was designed the same year that Pablo Casals played in the White House,” says Hubert Murray, past president of the Boston Society of Architects. “There was a spirit of newness after the Eisenhower years which was taken up at Harvard.”

By contrast, MIT turned to Scandinavian modernists to create some of its campus landmarks, first bringing in Finnish architect Alvar Aalto to teach in 1940, following the success of his Finnish pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. For Baker House dormitory (1949), Aalto met the challenge of a long site wedged between a highway and larger MIT structures by designing a sinuously undulating building with brick walls inside and out.
A few years later, MIT commissioned Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen to design Kresge Auditorium and Kresge Chapel (both 1955). The auditorium, sometimes affectionately called “the flying saucer,” is a pioneering thin-shell concrete building. It presages Saarinen’s TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York in its use of thin slices from a catenary curve. From the exterior, the round chapel resembles a brick muffin that has fallen from the sky; inside, the rippling brick wall and play of light on the floating altar screen of soldered steel, by sculptor and industrial designer Harry Bertoia, create a spiritual sanctuary.

In 1959, Wellesley College in the Boston suburbs engaged Paul Rudolph, who had studied with Gropius at Harvard, to design its Jewett Art Center. The Jewett is less monumental than Rudolph’s later buildings and its brick skin is more conventional. Nonetheless, the trellis-like screen across the building’s face foreshadows Rudolph’s later use of ornamentation. The tunnel-like entrance is pure Rudolph, anticipating the tunnels and passageways of his later Brutalist work in cast concrete and even the interwoven levels of his late glass skyscrapers, such as the Singapore Concourse (1994).

Boston Architectural College, a Brutalist-style concrete building from 1963–66, by Ashley, Meyer and Associates, sports an incongruous trompe l’oeil mural, by Richard Haas, of a classical-style domed palace.

Modern architecture was by no means confined to college campuses. “A lot of planning that had gone on in the 1950s really exploded around 1960 with the ‘New Boston,’” says DOCOMOMO’s Fixler. It was at that time that Boston’s mayor and city council developed plans to re-energize the urban center in the face of economic doldrums and declining population as the middle class moved to the Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132