Landscape Architecture Magazine

The reflecting pool at Boston’s Christian Science Plaza/ Photo by Alan Ward

From the January 2013 issue of LAM:

By Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA

Each generation makes and remakes the city, through grand schemes and incremental acts. As they alter the city’s streets and public spaces, our mayors, developers, institutions, planners, architects, engineers, and landscape architects reimagine the texture and shape of urban life. Aldo Rossi suggests, in The Architecture of the City (1966), that the city is built on the collective memory of events and impulses, achievements and artifacts, and forces of evolutionary change; its cultural ethos accrues through alteration and the passage of time. Would anyone not endorse Boston as a consummate example?

People love Boston’s coherent, identifiable character, one that evolved over four centuries as it has grown from a coastal village to a thriving metropolis. It’s a city rich in cultural assets—America’s Athens. Its iconic spaces have by necessity adapted to changing contexts: the practical simplicity of the Common, which supports varied forms of public life today as it did in 1620; the pattern of crooked colonial streets, which keeps travel downtown confusing to visitors but picturesquely varied and pleasing; the elegant hierarchies and radical urban reform expressed in the planning of the Back Bay and Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace, which have proved resilient in the face of massive change; the inspired and majestic rock pile of H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church, somehow even more compelling alongside the prismatic marvel of Harry Cobb’s John Hancock Tower. We can all identify other notable Boston treasures and how they’ve been altered in the face of new realities.

(more…)

Read Full Post »