hall on the waterfront, while most Boston architects and architecture critics have rallied to the building’s defense.

By contrast, the John Hancock Tower (1976) at the edge of Copley Square in Back Bay has been embraced as a Boston landmark, despite strong opposition when it was proposed and engineering problems revealed during construction. (In high winds, the 60-story glass spire shed windows and its upper floors swayed.)

“As a pure statement about building a large building in an historical context in the mid-20th century,” says Murray, “it’s very poetic.”
Some of that poetry is the deference the building shows to its neighbors on Boston’s most historic and architecturally significant public square. The rhomboidal wedge slides into its lot as a person might turn sideways to slip into a crowded elevator. The reflective blue glass that Henry Cobb of I. M. Pei & Partners (now Pei Cobb Freed & Partners) chose to clad the tower brings the sky to earth and magnifies the glories of neighboring Trinity Church. Remarking on the Hancock, Massachusetts author John Updike had one of his short story characters observe, “all art, all beauty is reflection.”

Reflection is a key theme at the nearby Christian Science World Headquarters (1970) at the corner of Huntington and Massachusetts Avenues. Another Harvard graduate from the Gropius era, Araldo A. Cossutta, led the design team for I. M. Pei & Partners. (Pei was also a Gropius student at Harvard.) The three new buildings — a 28-story tower, a three-story Sunday school and a five-story colonnaded building that merges the Church’s media headquarters with public areas — are self-effacing structures, but they are visually linked to the grand Mother Church basilica (1906) by a

[SIDEBAR]
Modern Homes near Boston
While several architecturally significant modern homes have been built over the years in the Boston suburbs, only one is open to the public: the Walter Gropius House at 68 Baker Bridge Road, in Lincoln. Designed by Gropius in 1937 as his home soon after he arrived in the United States, it is maintained as a house museum by Historic New England (www.historicnewengland.org). In contrast to the architect’s large academic and commercial buildings, the house is a modest three-bedroom horizontal composition with a curved portico entrance and an external spiral staircase that leads to a second-story deck. Many of the original furnishings by Gropius and his Bauhaus colleagues are intact, including a prototype model of Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair.
Gropius did not arrive at Harvard to a world untouched by modernism. Boston-area architects were already applying the principals of the International Style to private residences. The homes mentioned below still stand.

Edwin “Ned” Goodell, an MIT-trained architect, was converted to modernism on a trip to France in 1931. In 1934, he completed an International Style house for Richard and Caroline Crosby Field at 74 Sudbury Road in Weston. Set in the New England countryside, it was a revelation of intricately joined boxes with extensive glazing, designed to fit into its stepped hillside setting rather than dominate it. The house was put on the market as a tear-down in 2000, but through the efforts of local preservationists, it was repaired and sold to a private owner.

Carl Koch, who would later gain fame for his Techbilt prefab modern houses, worked with Edward Durell Stone to create a home for Koch’s parents at 4 Buckingham Street in Cambridge, completed about a year before Gropius’s own home. Like most of the modern homes built in urban settings around Boston, the Koch house presents a blank face to the street, in this case, a high stone wall enclosing an outdoor extension of the glass-walled living room.

Marcel Breuer, who had worked with Gropius in Germany before fleeing to London, joined his old friend at Harvard in 1937, and in 1939 built his own house a few hundred yards from Gropius’s in Lincoln. That same year he also designed the J. Ford House, directly across Woods End Road from his own. Large expanses of glass on the south side flood both homes with light, especially during the winter.

Among the high-powered students that Gropius attracted was Philip Johnson. As his graduate thesis, he designed his personal residence at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge, completed in 1943. The house is inscrutable from the street: a 9-foot-high wall encloses a courtyard, which, according to the plans, is slightly larger than the house.

In 1940, Harvard architecture professor Walter Bogner completed a house in Cambridge at 45 Fayerweather Street. The red-brick cladding of this International Style building helps to harmonize it with the predominantly Victorian brick architecture of the neighborhood. Its L–shaped design of long horizontal boxes encloses a private garden.

World War II halted home construction around Boston, but pent-up demand for housing after the war led to the creation of a community of modern homes occupied largely by modernist architects. In 1948, The Architects Collaborative purchased 20 acres and created a set of guidelines and covenants — still in effect — for Six Moon Hill on Moon Hill Road in Lexington. Over the years, 28 rather similar homes were built, each adapted to the specific features of the rolling landscape. Their horizontal lines slide into their hillside settings to contrast with the natural verticals of the surrounding trees.