As a fitting conclusion to the work of my students last semester – culminating in the publication of Civic Rooms for Rent (available from Lulu) – I attended two civic events within three days. The first was Mayor Menino’s State of the City Address at Faneuil Hall and the second was the official re-opening of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the last of a sequence of events celebrating the completion of Renzo Piano’s elegant new wing. Both events were held in significant civic rooms: Faneuil Hall, the uber-example of my students’ research, and Piano’s unorthodox music hall. Despite the stylistic differences, both events had similar characteristics: the scale of the spaces and particularly New England-ish arrangement of the seating (shallow tiers of seats ignorant of the location of the performance), the program for both rituals (foreplay provided by a convocation and a short performance by representatives of Boston’s “youth”), and the presence of the Mayor and more than a fair share of the City’s leadership (city councilors and department heads). I am happy to report that Boston’s civic life continues to be staged in significant architectural spaces!

-Tim

Digging through an old file cabinet, we came across this New York Times crossword puzzle, which describes us perfectly.

-          Meera

As a rock-paper-scissors alternative to the Toronto podium-and-tower, consider the street-level infill solution of this fine example on West Street in Downtown Boston. In this case, the typologically determined C-shape of the light-and-air determined pre-war masonry office building plan is carried to the ground - and an infill piece, with a lighter metal frame expression, is added to define the street wall. Genius!

-Tim

Proving that Worcester is a treasure trove of unintended architectural lessons, I discovered this triple decker on Tuesday. There are no windows in the stair, despite plenty of available surfaces. Interestingly, you would never know that you were in an additive “outie” when using the stair. It would seem no different than walking down a stair buried deep in the plan.

-Tim

One of the best places to understand specific design operations for a nimble urbanism is where churches – and their associated appendages (rectories and the like) - meet the historic residential fabric in Boston. In this example, on lower Mt. Vernon Street in Beacon Hill, the apsidal end of the Advent Church (that faces Brimmer Street) meets the end of a row of townhouses. In this case, the large scale of the apse is balanced by the almost-miniature scale of the girdle-like ambulatory at its base. This shift to a dollhouse scale means that the abutting townhouse is not overwhelmed by the overall mass of the church. Most satisfying is the negative space at the intersection – like something out of Scott Cohen’s studios at the GSD. Note the tiny bathroom window deep in the crotch – an amplified version of the scale-inversions that propel the entire composition.

-Tim