CultureNOW - Berkeley Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Berkeley Street

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
In these pictures we see the loss of a fine building, but also the strange survival of one motif through three generations of architecture.

The older photo shows the Coulton Building, an office building of 1905, at the corner of Boylston and Berkeley in the Back Bay. Above the hideous ground-floor renovation, the Coulton is a rich texture of flat brick walls and bay windows. Some bays protrude outward, some are sunk. The architects were Putnam and Cox. Architect and author Donlyn Lyndon, who taught for a time at MIT, once wrote, "This may be my favorite building in Boston."

Notice especially the corner. Here the Coulton flowers into an elegant turret of four octagonal glass bays.

The Coulton was demolished in 1989 after a preservation battle that was lost by a single vote in the Boston Landmarks Commission. The building was replaced in 1991, by the vast 222 Berkeley Street, shown in the current photo. The new building hides its bulk at the corner, where it rises to a mere six stories -- one more than the Coulton. The boldest feature is a round four-story glass turret, a turret that looks a lot like the Coulton's. The architect of 222, Robert A. M. Stern, confirms our guess: He was deliberately mimicking the Coulton in order to preserve a memory of the past.

Now the story gets more complex. Before the Coulton, there was another building on this site. It was a YMCA built in 1883, by architects Sturgis & Brigham. Its most notable feature was a round glass turret at the Boylston-Berkeley corner.

The Y burned in the early 1900s, and the Coulton was built on its site, reusing the Y's foundations and at least one of its walls. And the Coulton's architects -- like Robert Stern 86 years later -- chose to incorporate a memory of the previous building and chose to do so by reinventing the turret.

The turret motif, by now, feels like the DNA of this particular site. A genetic code seems to determine that anything here must sprout a round glass tower. It's as if the men in a family handed down a Roman nose through the generations.

But the architectural plot is even thicker. A mile or so away, the 1951 wing of the old Jordan Marsh department store (now Macy's) stands at the corner of Summer and Chauncy. It's a handsome red-brick building, in a style that's vaguely Federal and vaguely Deco, by architects Perry, Shaw & Hepburn. Its most striking feature is the corner, where it is carved boldly back in a deep concave curve. Projecting from the center of that curve is our old friend the round glass turret, this time three stories tall.

At 222 Berkeley, Robert Stern's turret projects from just such a concave curve.

We haven't bothered to ask: It's obvious that Stern, a scholar-architect who sometimes seems to have memorized every building on earth, has shaped his corner to recall not merely one historic Boston predecessor, but two.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Round Trip",Boston Globe, 30 January 2005

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Location

Boylston Street & Berkeley Street
Boston, MA 02116
United States

Nearby Items

The Berkeley at 420 Boylston		181 feet
Boylston Street at Berkeley Street		362 feet
37 Newbury Street		684 feet
New England Mutual Life Insurance Building		704 feet
Berkeley Building		892 feet
Ancient Fishweir Murals		950 feet
Arlington Street Church		0.2 miles