BOSTON SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTS/AIA
THE BOSTON SURPRISE 42° 21’30”N, 71° 03’37”W
Often referred to as the last European city in America, Boston’s historic buildings and public spaces are well known. Less well known perhaps is the “new Boston,” the incredibly diverse and modern Boston that has emerged in recent years, a sparkling design counterpoint that redefines the city as it enriches our understanding of the historic past. Boston is a jazz symphony not only of old and new but of the old reinterpreted by the new and the new magnificently framed by the old.
From McKim Mead and White’s fin de siècle masterpiece, the Boston Public Library, to today’s reinvention of the Institute of Contemporary Art by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Perry Dean Rogers Partners, Boston encompasses the wondrous breadth and depth of architectural history on this continent—or at least in New England.
See Our Transformation
Boston has been transformed by its national 2008 AIA Architecture Firm Award recipients—Leers Weinzapfel Associates, Cambridge Seven, Ben Thompson Associates, Kallmann McKinnell and Wood, Sert Jackson, Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, the Stubbins Associates, and TAC—as well as from the imaginations of Henry Hobson Richardson (Trinity Church still stands on 4,500 wooden piles), Charles Bulfinch, and Frederick Law Olmsted. The city has welcomed work (sometimes with trepidation but always with profound intellectual curiosity and a frisson of our never-ironic sense of noblesse oblige) by Gehry Associates (we’ve got two of these); Behnisch Architekten; Edward Larrabee Barnes; I. M. Pei; Renzo Piano (in progress); Rafael Moneo; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Chicago; Philip Johnson; Sert; Steven Holl Architects; Robert A. M. Stern Architects; Moshe Safdie and Associates (another work in progress); Corbu; and, of course, Thomas Jefferson (according to a reliable source, Jefferson—an unlicensed practitioner—conceived Monticello and the University of Virginia while visiting Boston seeking dental treatment and Red Sox souvenirs).
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