12c Conversation on Copley Square: Reflections

^C

200 Clarendon, the Berkeley Buidling, 500 Boylston and Trinity Church. Minimalist High Modern, Gothic-derived Art Deco, phallic Postmodern and Richardsonian Romanesque. Digital collage by author.

The sky collapses on the southeastern corner of Copley Square. The Square's already delicate urban existence should shatter from the weight of a skyscraper — of the corporate developers that turn civic spaces into over-efficient offices — but the Hancock applies only the pressure of the atmosphere it mimes.¹ Clad in a grid of reflective glass, the monument is mute. Harry Cobb joins Copley's discussion with a tall tale, only to listen as the others exchange fables. The building's taciturn mirror becomes the playground for the projections of others.² The building is a paradox, a ferocious ambiguity, and its silence intensifies the discourse on architecture, aesthetics and the urban condition occurring around Copley. It claims not to take a side in these debates, or even be a party to them, yet it takes both sides, neither and a third. It introduces new arguments while only repeating old ones. It screams in a whisper of its internal agony.

¹ The once outrageous proposal of a skyscraper on Copley Square seems quaint today. Not only does the Hancock so obviously belong to and help define Copley and the city at large, but numerous albeit shorter towers have sprung up all around.

² Writing about Copley is difficult. It is such a studied place that very few points on it haven't been made, most of which are relevant only to niche architectural understandings. (Nevertheless, MALarch is a practice in writing about spaces;their prevalence in and relevance to discourse is not a priority.) For the Hancock, this paralysis intensifies — Cobb's masterpiece has been explored many times over, including by Cobb himself both during, after and much beyond the process of its design. To name a couple compelling inspections of the Hancock: a conversation between Cobb, Eisenman and Moneo at the GSD in 2018 and the few chapters Cobb designates to it in his monograph Henry N. Cobb: Words &Works. There are many more, but those suffice in showing the breadth of intellectual discussion that this building has forced others to have in its quietude.

The prototypical high-rise skews towards Mies' unbuilt Friedrichstrasse tower, a shining pillar of material engineering and Modernism,³ but the skewed archetype arrives too late, many years past the Movement's demise. Where Mies showcases the tower's edges in opulent crystal points, Cobb shifts the Hancock's bulk behind its razor-edge, effectively removing its canopy from the Square. The side-stepping form defers to the old John Hancock tower behind, allowing its Art Deco spire to foretell the weather to this day: "Steady blue, clear view / Flashing blue, clouds due / Steady red, rain ahead / Flashing red, snow instead." Cobb does not wish to cut anyone out of Copley's conversation (especially not someone with such salient information);⁴ despite looking down on the discussion, the mild-mannered skyscraper respects its context. Cobb is a Bostonian, after all, and his trapezoidal spire greets its neighbors with a principled base that aligns with existing edifices and matches existing heights. A skyscraper, however, has more neighbors than those on the street. As the Hancock speaks two tongues on Copley, it carries another dichotomous conversation with Boston's spine: the narrow march of towers that reads like a police lineup against the skyline from downtown to the Pru.

³ Mies' design could not be built as conceived with the building technology of the time, and even a half century later, windows would pop out of the Hancock as the unforeseen air pressure issues wreaked havoc on its minimalist detailing for material expression.

⁴ This tangent continues with the fact that the old John Hancock tower shares an architect, Crams &Ferguson, with the New England Building. When viewed from Copley Square, the two flank Trinity Church a block beyond. High on the right is the foretold weather. Lower on the left is the time. Practical buildings for an improvised square.

The minimal approach taken in response to the site plan plays out in a mysterious way when seen from afar. Unlike other skyscrapers, which occupy their aerial domain volumetrically, the Hancock either collapses against the sky like a James Turrell piece or disappears in a blade of blue, depending on whence in the city one sees it. In a happy coincidence, the shift in plan at the scale of the site results in a realignment at the scale of the city as the Hanock turns almost perpendicular to Huntington Avenue along the South End's grid. Unlike its boxy rival, the older and just-ever-so-intentionally shorter Prudential Tower, the Hancock could not appear anywhere. Its ethereal form feels too much like a singularity, a universal form that has arisen only in this particular place. Its local manifestation, however, operates along a broader horizon, emulating an architectural ideology shared with numerous projects around the globe. Easy aesthetic comparisons can be drawn to other Pei Cobb Freed projects as well as works by Norman Foster, Renzo Piano and SOM, all of which can be traced back to their architects' revised Modernist approach within a Postmodern world: a Global Style. Hal Foster coins this perverse term as a sequel to the International Style, and as a capitalist corruption of Kenneth Frampton's Critical Regionalism.⁵ Indeed, the Hancock fits these criteria as it seeks to rationalize the admittance of an albeit local corporation's ostentatious high-rise on an historic plaza. Cobb arrives at his localized result by running a minimal methodology of practical needs through a site analysis. Always two-sided, the Hancock oscillates between local roots and global reaches. Its silence enumerates its dedication to its site as understood through the lens of its time, yet despite its grounding in space and time, the Hancock abstracts to a single surface in the sky, a small grid against an enveloping atmosphere. The farther one gets from it, the fewer sides the Hancock seems to have.

⁵ I have cited this before, but nevertheless The Art-Architecture Complex (New York: Verso, 2011), 18–67.

When the Hancock seldom speaks, it whispers to H. H. Richardon's Trinity Church. Walking near the tower, Trinity is everywhere, reflected around corners and gazing into itself. The Hancock declares its stark facade as a testament to the ornament-free aesthetics of Modernism's less is more dogma, yet its 'less' appears as Trinity's 'more'. This hardly makes Cobb a practitioner of Richardsonian Romanesque, but it does betray the purity one might expect in a wholly Modernist tower, a claim that would predate the Hancock's compromised situation. Rather than build a monument in a field, Cobb constructs a response to a site. In the collapsing areas between the two buildings, the projected space of the Hancock becomes both old and new. The Hancock's paradox reveals itself to be a predicament of postmodernity that eats away at the tower's foundation, forcing it into an equivocal discomfort with, above and after Copley's conversation.

This entry continues in Conceptions.