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