CultureNOW - Boston University School of Public Health: Peter Vanderwarker

Boston University School of Public Health

Dates

1876

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
In the popular mind, there used to be three basic styles of American architecture:
Early American, Ugly Victorian, and Sterile Modem. The building we see here could stand as the icon of Ugly Victorian, except for a funny change of taste. Over the past couple of decades, Victorian has come to seem beautiful again.

We're looking at a building on Albany Street in the South End, designed in 1876 as the new home of the Boston University School of Medicine. Architect William Ralph Emerson, like other Victorians, didn't believe in leaving much out. He created a picturesque pile of porches, dormers, gables, arches, and chimneys. Even the brick walls and slate roof can't be left alone, but are trimmed with horizontal stripes. "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," said one of William Emerson's cousins, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and certainly William wasn't lacking in that quality. He went on to a distinguished career as one of the inventors of the famous Shingle Style of the New England coast. Wings were later added to his BU building by other architects, in a similar but slightly more sober style.

It's hard to know what to call this building. The central tower is French mansard, but the porch is English hammer beam; and so it goes. The arched windows don't look quite right beneath their pointed gable roofs, but that's part of the fun. The message: America is the heir of all the ages, and European culture is a menu from which to pick and choose.

Why do we love Victorian again? Probably because we're in a period of reaction against the austerity of modernism, just as the Victorians reacted against the austerity of the Greek Revival style. Luckily, the building survives. Now called the Talbot Building, after the medical school's first dean, it has just been sensitively converted by Boston architect Tad Stahl into quarters for the BU School of Public Health. The newer photo shows it as the centerpiece of the university's vast medical complex.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Boston University School of Public Health", Boston Globe, 1997

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Location

Albany St & E Newton St
Boston, MA 02118
United States

Nearby Items

South Bay Harbor Trail		692 feet
Art on View at the Moakley Building		0.4 miles
Roxbury Canal (Albany Street at Massachusetts Avenue)		0.4 miles
Washington Street at W Concord Street		0.5 miles
South End		0.5 miles
Washington Street at Massachusetts Avenue		0.5 miles
Cathedral of the Holy Cross		0.5 miles