Tag Archives: Boston Public Library

A look at the library

Summer has ended. We’re back. The renovations to the 1972 Johnson building at the Central Library are finished. You must see the results. They are scrumptious.

It was the former library president, Amy Ryan, whose experience in other parts of the country helped her envision a happier and more serviceable space in the building named after its architect, Philip Johnson. She initiated a strategic planning effort, consulting with users all over Boston. The result was the Compass Plan, adopted in 2011, that set forth eight principles for a new type of urban library. Those principles guided the renovations. She then oversaw the project from the start to more than halfway finished. The current BPL president, David Leonard, was in on the project from the beginning.

William Rawn’s architecture firm, one of Boston’s best, designed the rebuild. Well-versed city representatives were also involved since Boston’s capital budget provided the $78 million for the construction, which took place in two phases.

I served on the library’s citizens’ advisory committee with other downtown neighbors. I saw plans before the construction started and enjoyed working with the impressive team. I thought I might be biased in judging the outcome. So I asked my friend Sally Hinkle, a librarian trained at Columbia University, to visit the library with me and comment on the renovations.

She loved it. She pointed out that it now looks like a library. Amazing.

As we walked in, we saw another amazing sight—activity. People sit at counters along the newly-revealed windows, playing or studying on their computers. The formerly cavernous, sterile entryway now contains books, all at hand or wheelchair height. Newspapers are near the door. Drop in on your way to work, have a read, and get out quickly. Sally, ever the librarian, picked up a misplaced book and put it back on the shelf in the right place.

No longer must you walk halfway through the building to find the information desk. It is only a few steps from the front door, so you can quickly get directions.

The interiors are warm, colorful and curvy—as different as possible from its predecessor. The cold granite floor has been replaced with extra-durable Hungarian limestone. The ceiling’s repetitive arches of wooden slats embrace the space. Orangey-red comfortable chairs will need cleaning and maintenance, but taking care of them should be worth it. Hard-cover books depicting the Boston skyline adorn one wall.

We visited before the Newsfeed Café and WGBH’s studio opened to the right of the entrance, but we could see that their activity will be visible from all sides. A broadcast studio is a fitting activity to incorporate into a contemporary library, the name of which now signals learning more than just books.

During the design phase I worried that the large entry space would be undifferentiated, with one part oozing into another. But the curves solve that problem, moving visitors through and defining spaces.

The bright, warm, cheerfulness continued—mostly—throughout the other rooms and is clearly attracting a following. The building was full of people. The computer room has expanded, offering 105 computers, twice the number in the old place. Almost every space was occupied. People had taken over most of the orangey chairs upstairs. At tables upstairs, many toiled on their own computers. The atmosphere was quiet but busy, companionable but focused, up-to-date but comfortable.

Sally felt the money had been spent wisely on the most important needs, and she was thrilled at how many people were using the space. “Remember when people said we didn’t need libraries—that we didn’t need books?” she asked, as if she had known the answer for a long time.

A Bay Village resident, Rick Weaver, 23, said he came to the Central Library once or twice a week to get caught up on his accounting work because the surroundings were so nice.

The only jarring note was the one room left from the original design. Deferrari Hall is the square, grey, tall room in the center with the double staircases. It was landmarked by the Boston Landmarks Commission, as was the building itself, who apparently were dazzled by the celebrity of the architect, Philip Johnson. Celebrity, yes. Good architect? A couple of his buildings might be interesting, but this Boston Public Library addition isn’t one of them.

The hall is cold, and the stairs are overwhelming rather than majestic. We noticed people avoided the hall if they could, walking around the outside to get to the elevators rather than crossing through it. Someone had tried to warm up the place with a circle of plants, but it wasn’t working. No one was using the stairs, although some people must. Certainly few will want to get married in Deferrari Hall as they do in the garden next door in the McKim building, but the hall is the architect’s failed attempt to reflect that beautiful space.

The Landmarks Commission did allow the architects to do away with Johnson’s bizarre granite slabs that blocked light and vistas from the first floor windows, which were also replaced. Supposedly these were incorporated because city people were afraid of the street in the 1970s. But I was living here then, and no one I knew was afraid. Instead we occupied those streets.

The building still is a thud on the landscape, but inside it is considerably better than it was. Thank goodness for the vision and leadership that brought this new space into being.

When should a building be landmarked?

Mayor Walsh wants to illuminate Boston City Hall, which opened in 1969. William Rawn’s redesign of architect Philip Johnson’s 1971 addition to the Boston Public Library is coming to fruition.

These two events bring home the complications of deciding what architecture to preserve in a history-obsessed city.

These buildings have commonalities. They are public, built with taxpayers’ money at about the same time. They both employ the Brutalism style, although the Johnson building uses granite, not concrete. Architects and architectural historians appreciate them. The public mostly detests them.

The Johnson building was landmarked by the Boston Landmarks Commission in 2000. Landmarks oversees Boston’s historic districts, imposes demolition delays on historic structures, and designates buildings as landmarks, according to chair Lynn Smiledge. In the Johnson building’s case, this means the commission must approve changes to its exterior, entry hall and the voluminous staircase atrium.

City Hall is not landmarked. When the mayor wanted to illuminate it, however, he had to obtain Landmarks’ approval because the building’s landmark status is “pending.” In 2007, several residents, including Douglass Shand-Tucci, Sue Prindle, and Friends of the Public Garden founder Henry Lee, submitted a petition to landmark City Hall. The next step would be for Landmarks to commission a study describing the building’s architectural and historic importance to the city and to the state, region or nation. That study was not undertaken.

“There has been a drum beat against mid-century modernism,” said architectural historian Keith Morgan, a professor at Boston University. Morgan believes City Hall’s poor condition is a reason the public doesn’t warm to it. He was one of several individuals who urged Landmarks to move forward with the City Hall study.

“City Hall is clearly of landmark quality,” he said. “It’s the exceptional nature of its design and its historic significance. It was the building that reversed Boston’s downward spiral. We owe it a debt of gratitude.”

Such exhortations have fallen on deaf ears. Lauren Zingarelli, Director of Communications and Community Engagement in the Mayor’s Office of Environment, Energy, and Open Space explained it this way:

“Each year the BLC Work Plan prioritizes two or three study reports for pending landmarks,” she said. “These priorities are based on available funding, owner support and perceived threat.”

With little “owner” support—i.e. two mayors—and threats to the building proposed only by them, Landmarks probably saw few benefits from moving forward on City Hall.

The Johnson building’s story is different. Both library buildings were designated at the same time. They were not threatened. No one would probably object to landmarking the 1895 McKim building that faces Copley Square.

But the Johnson building’s architectural significance is unclear. The report said, “The Johnson addition looks reverently to the McKim building for several of its architectural guiding principles and yet utterly disregards it many ways . . . The starkness of the Johnson addition continues the refined grandeur of the McKim without competing with its visual richness. The disdain for the human scale evident in the Johnson design, however, undercuts the effectiveness of utilizing classical principles in its arrangement and renders its academic ideal lifeless.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of architectural significance.

The Johnson building’s historic significance is also dubious.

The report said it shows how “library philosophy” has changed. For example, open stacks were the norm in the mid-20th century as they had not been in the 1800s. Perhaps that can be construed as history.

The report dwells on Philip Johnson’s importance as a scholar, a taste-maker, and a person whose “sympathy with the Beaux-Arts . . . [gives] his work an altogether more serious character.”

The Kardashians are taste-makers too. It’s hard to see Johnson’s sympathy with the Beaux-Arts in any of his buildings except maybe in symmetry.

Keith Morgan pushed back on me. Johnson and others like him had a profound influence on other architects, he said. That is important.

These buildings’ stories leave one feeling that landmarking, like much of human endeavor, is fraught with subjective feelings despite the principles in place.

Questions still need to be answered.

  • Should a certain amount of time pass before a building is considered for landmarking—say 50 years? The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s original “palace” and its 2012 Renzo Piano addition were landmarked in 2011, before the addition was finished. The addition is fine, but is this another case of a celebrity architect trumping a measured judgment of how a building works with the city over time?
  • To what extent should the public’s affection for a building affect landmarking? Victorian buildings we now appreciate were dismissed by some 20th century critics as vulgar. A future example could be the Hurley Building and its mental health facility, the Lindemann Center, on Cambridge Street. Keith Morgan praises its sculptural quality, but its unpleasant relationship to the street, even without the temporary, dirty steel fences around it, makes pedestrians want to walk on the other side. Its maker was celebrity architect Paul Rudolph.
  • To what extent should materials be considered? We’ve learned that concrete ages poorly, and it’s not only because the public concrete buildings have been left to rot.
  • Can we consider how a building contributes to a sense of place, a sense of Boston? The old Shreve, Crump and Low building at the corner of Boylston and Arlington did not receive landmark status and sits empty, destined for demolition. Its removal will affect the sense of early 20th century Boston within a whole block.

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I hope more regular citizens get involved in these matters so we can hash them out.