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Another Building by a
Noted Modernist Comes Under Threat,
This Time in Boston
| Março 2007
By DAVID HAY
Published: March 7, 2007, New York Times
BOSTON, March 1 A plan to demolish a 1960 office tower by the
influential architect Paul Rudolph threatens to pit a prominent
developer backed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino against preservationists
who see the building as a seminal example of midcentury Modernism.
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A rendering of Renzo Piano's design
for Trans National Place. |
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Paul Rudolph’s 1960 Blue Cross/Blue
Shield Building in Boston could be demolished to make way for an
80-story tower designed by Renzo Piano.
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If the developer,
Steve Belkin, prevails, Mr. Rudolph’s 13-story structure will be
supplanted by an 80-story skyscraper designed by one of today’s
biggest names, the Italian architect
Renzo Piano.
On March 13 the Boston Landmarks Commission plans to consider Mr.
Belkin’s application for a demolition permit for the Rudolph
building, at 133 Federal Street, in the city’s financial district.
The commission, whose jurisdiction covers all buildings in downtown
Boston and in other neighborhoods more than 50 years old, can order
a 90-day delay during which it can ask the applicant to consider
alternatives to demolition.
Several groups, including Docomomo, an international organization
devoted to preserving Modernist buildings, plan to submit statements
at the hearing urging the commission to recommend that the city
delay issuing the permit by 90 days.
“We are not opposed to the new development, but we would like to
think there is a solution that could accommodate the preservation of
Mr. Rudolph’s building,” David Fixler, president of Docomomo’s New
England branch, said. “It is a very significant piece of Boston’s
architectural heritage and deserves a complete hearing.”
Similar battles to prevent demolition of Rudolph residences have
been unsuccessfully waged in Sarasota, Fla., and Westport, Conn., in
recent years; preservationists are now fighting to save his
Riverview High School in Sarasota.
The squat tower in Boston, originally called the Blue Cross/Blue
Shield Building, was the first Modernist office building to rise in
this city’s downtown, according to Docomomo. Its ornately intricate
concrete exterior was viewed as a controversial rejoinder to the
prevailing International Style of the 1950s, in which high-rises
were typically wrapped in glass.
Currently owned by Mr. Belkin’s company, Trans National Properties,
it is part of the Winthrop Square redevelopment, whose biggest
portion is occupied by a city-owned parking garage. At the urging of
Mayor Menino, Mr. Belkin submitted the sole proposal in November to
build the 80-story tower on the site. Preliminary drawings for the
Piano tower call for it to be topped by a “lookout garden” and to
strive for certification as an environmentally sensitive green
building. Also planned are an adjoining covered plaza and an indoor
public garden. The board of the Boston Redevelopment Authority,
which must approve projects larger than 20,000 square feet, endorsed
the proposal in late January with Mr. Piano in attendance. The
developer has until April 25 to submit a financing plan to the
authority.
James W. Hunt, chief of environmental and energy services for the
city, said that Mayor Menino was committed to the Piano tower. “It
furthers his vision of Boston becoming a contemporary architecture
hub,” he said.
But preservationists argue that the Rudolph building need not be
sacrificed to make way for the Piano tower. Ideally, they say, the
1960 structure might even enter into a visual dialogue with a bold
new tower.
In this month’s issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, Timothy M. Rohan, an assistant professor of art history
at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says the building
received a mixed reception upon its completion. It drew praise from
the architect
Philip Johnson and later from the architectural historian
Vincent J. Scully Jr., who applauded its “excellent relationship to
the pre-existing street” and said it prefigured the progressive
urbanist schemes of Alison and Peter Smithson in London.
But Architectural Forum called the building “one of the most
controversial structures put up in the U.S. in some time.”
Unlike many of his Modernist peers, Mr. Rohan said in an interview,
Mr. Rudolph “felt the need to respond to the mainly 19th-century
historic styles then surrounding the site.”
“He thus decided against a glass-paneled facade, opting for this
richly detailed but still Modern shell,” he said. “In this
appreciation of urban context, he was far ahead of his time.”
Some architecture enthusiasts detect a paradox. For them, Mr.
Rudolph’s architectural experiment offers parallels to some of Mr.
Piano’s early triumphs, like the 1977 Pompidou Center in Paris (designed
with Richard Rogers), with its exposed mechanical systems.
Many of the precast concrete piers that line the exterior of the
Blue Cross/Blue Shield Building, for example, are hollow to
accommodate the building’s engineering systems, including its
heating and cooling. “By moving the structural systems to the
exterior, he added to the spaciousness and flexibility of the
interior,” Mr. Rohan said.
Mr. Fixler of Docomomo said: “There is a spirit of structural and
system experimentation associated with the Rudolph building that is
very close to Renzo Piano’s. If it could be saved, it would make a
good neighbor to his tower.”
In an interview, Mr. Piano said he wanted his tower to have a “light
presence,” hovering above the proposed 70-foot-high public plaza.
Without the vast open space, he said, his tower will seem too
aggressive, and only demolition of the Rudolph building will make
that wide plaza possible.
“I am a great admirer of Rudolph’s and I always ask myself, ‘Can we
try to keep a building as a piece of architectural memory?’ ” he
said. “But if it is not demolished, we lose the opportunity to
create a city square.”
Yet Mr. Piano added that he was under pressure from Mr. Belkin to
increase the tower’s width, something he said he could not agree to
do. That conflict leaves the project’s outcome even more unclear.
Mr. Piano also designed the new headquarters of The New York Times
Company, which is scheduled to open this spring.
In a letter he plans to submit to the Landmarks Commission, Mr.
Rohan points out that in 1986 Mr. Rudolph was hired by a former
owner of 133 Federal Street to produce a plan for developing that
site. Mr. Rudolph, who died in 1997, proposed doubling the building’s
size, an idea never realized.
One solution, Mr. Rohan suggested, “might be to use Rudolph’s
schemes as the inspiration for the expansion rather than demolition
of the structure.”
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