Scale on Boylston and Newbury

[ablarc]

SCALE ON BOYLSTON AND NEWBURY

NIMBYs generally love to talk about scale. When they use that term, however, they invariably mean height, and they attribute to height all sorts of ills that they would do better to pin on footprint.

Back Bay’s only remaining surface parking lot, for example, has no height at all, but it’s a serious disruption of Back Bay’s pedestrian scale. It’s been there for over forty years, and it’s so profitable that it’ll probably be there another forty –-unless they change their attitude to allow some height for a profitable building:



Both Boylston and Newbury have taller buildings among the prevailing small fry, and sometimes the footprint of a larger building encompasses two or at most, three lots. The lots are a bit bigger on Boylston Street, and its basic, fine-grain unit types are different from Newbury’s. This is because the master planners of Back Bay’s grid intended Boylston to be retail/office from the get-go, while Newbury Street was to be mostly residential.

Incrementally, Newbury’s ground floors were converted to retail and the front yards disappeared beneath paving. The miracle of Newbury Street --and why it surpassed Boylston in cachet— was precisely that the units met the sidewalk as town houses: a half-flight up and a few steps down.

In short order, both levels became retail. There was twice as much retail square footage per foot of sidewalk frontage! They couldn’t have designed it better if they had intended it –-which they didn’t. The setup was quaint; it encouraged coy, expensive, precious retail concepts; and it eventually succumbed to the big European and American boutique chains. On a Saturday it teems with shoppers.

Near the downtown end of Boylston Street where it approaches the Public Garden, a developer not so long ago assembled about seven lots. You’d think the resulting blockbuster footprint would put the kabbosh on the street’s scale, but miraculously that didn’t happen, because the architects deftly broke down the building's mass at the streetwall, stepped back the upper floors, stocked the ground floor with fine-grained retail, and clad the buildings tallest part in glass to make it read (if at all) as part of another building over yonder:



The old Ritz at the end of Newbury Street is perhaps a little less kind in its massing, but ritz is ritz, and if it’s real, it knows how to excuse itself with good decorum. That's to be found in its courteous and refined detail.

Looking at the same two blocks from the other side, our paragon’s virtue doesn’t extend to what it thinks of as its back side. Here it lets it all hang out and admits frankly, “I’m just a cheap building (gotta save some bucks somewhere).”

But who’s to know? Office tenants in the buildings on Newbury Street looking out their rear windows? Really, who cares?



Notice the fine grain of the commercial buildings on Newbury Street’s south side; these were planned to be commercial from day one. On the north (near) side, some of Newbury’s buildings are row houses. These have all been converted: “basement” and piano nobile are retail, upper three floors walk-up residential or sometimes office.

Along the far rear of the photo stretches a block-long office building from the Teens or Twenties (Park Square Building?). Though its footprint is mammoth, no one seems to mind this building. This is partly because it faces away toward the truly bobdignagian hotel; partly because it includes a surprising and pleasantly neglected interior shopping mall that registers like a relic from olden times; and partly because the building --aware of its vastness— chooses to make a virtue of it by composing itself as Palladio would have it: like a palace. There’s a central element and two symmetrical implied wings ending in identical “pavilions.” It's all done with diverse window treatments.

So it becomes a monument, and we don’t resent monuments for being big. In fact, we rather like it.

There is, however, a nefarious plan afoot by Developer Druker to assemble several lots on Boylston Street to lay a Pelli-designed, pig-footprint banality upon the street in place of the genteel, nicely-detailed but relatively unprofitable buildings that are there now. He mistakenly believed that by not proposing much height, the resulting building would evade criticsm; and –-Back Bay NIMBYs being as stupid as they are— at first he was right. The Back Bay NIMBYs sighed with relief until alerted about the impending groundscraper by this board. Now there’s an uproar.

About time they figured out that out-of-scale means footprint, not height.

They ought to limit developers' assemblies to two adjacent parcels.

* * *

Tripartite organization also characterizes two other immediately adjacent buildings on Boylston Street: the white, glazed terracotta Berkeley Building (1905, middle left in photo) and across Berkeley Street, Robert A.M. Stern’s base for a stumpy skyscraper, 222 Berkeley St. The former is a busty painted lady from the ragtime era complete with finials, pinnacles and bays, and Stern does his darndest to match her with a healthy dollop of pancake and rouge (how ‘bout them balls on top o’ them columns?).



He even throws in some bays, in homage to the beauty that he crassly displaced. You can see her on the “Boston in the Seventies” thread (http://www.archboston.org/community/...ead.php?t=2439).

[pelhamhall]

Thanks for this post - I really liked it and helped put the SC&L building and replacement into context for me.

Reading the Columbus Center thread makes me a little dumber, so it's nice to have a counterweight like this to help keep the equilibrium!

[underground]

It's always shocking to me how you could write a book about good and bad design principles based solely on examples from Boston (The North End vs the West End, Post Office Sq vs Govn't Ctr), and yet not a single one of the people who take it upon themselves to design the city (whether it be the BRA, area architects, developers) seems to have learned a single lesson!

[Corey]

Great points, you have a knack for this kind of writing.

[ablarc]

Originally Posted by underground

...not a single one of the people who take it upon themselves to design the city (whether it be the BRA, area architects, developers) seems to have learned a single lesson!

Well, the West End and Government Center mistakes are unlikely to be repeated in full glory anytime soon.

[statler]

^^Aye, that's the problem isn't it.

They continue building the same lifeless streetscape, but removed the one interesting thing about it... the grand scale.

[ablarc]

^ That's one way to see it, but I'd be happy if we could re-learn the art of streetscape that isn't lifeless.

It's not so hard, but we've got to overcome our reluctance to do things as they used to be done. The problem is that modernists built Zeitgeist theory right into the ideology. If you do things the way they were done before Modernism, the theory goes, you're a traitor to your times.You hear that theory all the time on this board.

The theory is both delusional and harmful. Delusional because it suggests there's a way to ram a square peg into a round hole, and harmful because it keeps us from getting out the round peg --which is available and can do the job. The outcome: the job doesn't get done and Modernism's tenure gets extended way beyond it's shelf life.

OK with Modernism; it always hated cities anyway.

[ablarc]

Originally Posted by underground

It's always shocking to me how you could write a book about good and bad design principles based solely on examples from Boston (The North End vs the West End, Post Office Sq vs Govn't Ctr), and yet not a single one of the people who take it upon themselves to design the city (whether it be the BRA, area architects, developers) seems to have learned a single lesson!

The first comment is truer, imo, than the second. There's much better understanding of urban design principles than you would have found in the Sixties.

The problem these days is sometimes that the drill is in fact so well understood (streetwall, ground floor retail, fragmented massing) that it becomes mere rote.

When you're dealing with today's largish increments of development, a little design brilliance is called for. Why is Boston's most inspired infill building still the Five Cents Savings Bank (Border's)?

[tobyjug]

That building on the northeast corner of Boylston and Dartmouth is a syphillitic sump of landlord pus.

At 222 Berkeley, Stern soils his panties with that ridiculous tadpole tail. Regrettably, Archstone Boston's architect was guilty of monkey see, monkey poo.

[Beton Brut]

Originally Posted by tobyjug

That building on the northeast corner of Boylston and Dartmouth is a syphillitic sump of landlord pus.

Sure-fire candidate for the Hall of Shame. If Ron Druker wants to tear something down and start from scratch, here's a winner. The other end of the block at Clarendon wouldn't be missed either.