12a Conversation on Copley Square: Foundations

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The Old South Church, the Boston Public Library and Copley Place. Ruskin's Venetian Gothic, Beaux-Artes Classicism and the Bauhaus Collaborative. Digital collage by author.

A group of old, white men sit in a park in Boston's Back Bay. Some are bespectacled Harvard graduates. Some, mustachioed Beaux-Artes cosmopolites. One man wears a Medieval habit. Others practice Medieval habits. They take turns forming an exquisite corpse as they converse well into the night. The city continues around them. Occasionally, a passer-by will stop and overhear the conversation, but these men have been talking for so long that their esoteric statements have passed beyond even ornamental gestures and contextual stances. Impassioned and impassive, they may as well be built of stone and glass. The Bostonian eavesdropper pulls back into the warmth of their scarf; looking at buildings gets chilly in the winter. The architects' effigies stay in place, chattering away in the snow.

The heterogenous buildings of Copley Square create a distinct urban moment within the neighborhood patchwork that makes up Boston. The Square's structures derive from different times and reflect oppositional architectural schools of thought. Meanwhile, Dorchester delivers triple-deckers block after block; downtown builds a Brutalist and Postmodern renaissance; the South End lays brick Victorian row houses around English squares, et cetera. Each neighborhood selects an aesthetic, an ideology, a style and replicates it until all the city's architecture ends up in echo chambers.¹ On most streets in Boston, the architectural discourse remains polite and self-affirming, but not at Copley Square. Here, the individual architectures have to stand for themselves.

¹ Some of this can be attributed to the fact that most neighborhoods find redevelopment at similar times, when many of the city's firms share a common pedagogical lineage.

The conversants do not merely stand, however; they stand out. A number of Boston's greatest architectures call Copley home. Though their impact extends far beyond the immediate area, the buildings themselves stem from the manifold demands of their site. Copley Square is a complex urban space, yet it is also much more than that: it is a void. The void draws in surrounding parties to generate a conversation on its own identity and — as the old men chattering in the park — that of architecture. Copley Square is the architectural moment of countless walking tours, sightseeing buses and semi-aquatic duck trucks. The eras it preserves showcase influential architects doing arguably their best work, defining themselves against the confrontational void of the Square. Each architect hones their approach to create something phenomenal. The calibre of the company assures anything less will be overlooked.

There are too many characters around Copley Square for one entry, so this entry will continue in additional reports. To begin, a triad of reports that explore: Charles McKim's Boston Public Library, the first building of its kind; Harry Cobb's 200 Clarendon, formerly the Hancock; and, of course, H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church. These three stand out amidst the busy city intersection. They cover the bases of Western architecture: Classical, Gothic and Modernist.² They offer spectacular places and spaces for those who see the skyline, visit the Square or enter their public interiors. They excel at being architecture. The beauty around Copley Square is that no one agrees on what being architecture is.

² This is a half-truth. While they reflect these sentiments, they are all modern. They are built on infilled land, after all. The ancients respected the sea.

This entry continues in Nonfictions.