CITY REPORT

Modernist Boston
By Patricia Harris and David Lyon

The buildings lining Boston’s streets are a catalogue of historic American architecture: colonial-era homes, Charles Bulfinch’s 1979 Federal-style State House and Beacon Hill mansions, Back Bay’s Victorian townhouses and Trinity Church, H.H. Richardson’s 1877 Copley Square masterpiece. As noted modernist architect Benjamin Thompson once observed, “The fact that Boston’s past touches us daily is the most modern thing about the city.”

Yet, outside of Los Angeles and Chicago, Boston has the greatest concentration of important modernist buildings of any major American city, according to David Fixler, president of the New England chapter of DOCOMOMO, an organization devoted to preserving buildings of the modern movement. The ideas of the European architectural avant-garde has been current in American intellectual circles since the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition on the International Style, and Boston’s willingness to embrace modernism has its seeds in the region’s forty-plus colleges and universities, especially Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University across the Charles River in Cambridge. Both led the way in commissioning modern architecture when greater Boston’s few scattered modern buildings were private homes and the region was just getting used to the idea that red brick faced with Doric columns was not the only valid building paradigm.

Modernism in Boston got its first boost in 1937 when Harvard hired Walter Gropius, director of Germany’s Bauhaus between the world wars, to chair the architecture department at its Graduate School of Design. Gropius’s mandate was to move architecture education at Harvard away from the Beaux Arts tradition toward functionalist European modernism. Under his leadership, the Graduate School of Design would become a major force in shaping a new American architecture.

Gropius’s successor, Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert, would continue along the same lines as architecture chair and dean of the school from 1953 to 1969. A colleague of both Gropius and innovative Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier since 1930, Sert was perhaps best-known in the United States for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1937. He had fled Spain for New York after the Spanish Civil War and spent the 1940s working on urban planning for several South American cities.

In 1945, Gropius and seven younger colleagues, including Benjamin Thompson, formed The Architects Collaborative (TAC). Their design for Harvard University’s Graduate Center complex (1950) introduced Boston to Bauhaus principles on a public scale. The seven dormitory buildings, which surround the Harkness Commons dining hall and recreational facility, are linked by flat canopies above walkways, forming a series of courtyards for student use. All eight buildings in the complex adhere to Bauhaus functionalism with their blocky profiles, unbroken facades and lack of ornamentation. The asymmetrical placement of the windows, however, breaks up the regularity of the planes and monotony of the visual grid.

While the Graduate Center sits deep in the campus next to Harvard Law School, Sert’s Holyoke Center (1961) anchors the east end of Harvard Square with a massive but gracefully stepped-back H-shaped complex of offices, retail space, parking and a health clinic. (Later redevelopment of the plaza incorporated outdoor café seating.) Solar fins projecting a few inches from the edges of the windows provide far more ornamentation than is customary in what is essentially an International Style complex.

The much smaller-scale Design Research Building on Brattle Street marks the west side of Harvard Square. This 1969 glass-walled