CultureNOW - State Street: Peter Vanderwarker

State Street

There are no podcasts available.

Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Like a vengeful giant in a nightmare, the office tower to known as One Boston Place blots out the sky and hulks menacingly over the Old State House in the newer of
these two views of State Street, in downtown Boston.

One Boston Place looks like a packing crate the real building came in. It expresses all too clearly what its blinkered architects and developers imagined it to be: a mere cubic volume of rentable space. Nothing about it suggests that it is a workplace for human beings instead of, say, a widget warehouse. Its endlessly repeated identical windows transmit an unmistakable message: Whatever lies behind them - whether people or goods - must be anonymous and interchangeable.

In the old photo, made in 1933, the Old State House, with its brave cupola, is already dwarfed by its neighbors. Yet it retains a certain dignity. In the 1991 view, One Boston Place hangs behind it like a photographer's backdrop, and the effect is to put the Old
State House on display. It has become a precious object, like an ornamental snuffbox in a museum. Robbed of its setting and natural scale, it no longer feels quite like a
real building.

There's one other change. The old photo shows us a world so richly textured that it looks like a textile display. The carpet of paving stones, the facades with their elaborate pattern of stonework and windows, even the signage that peppers everything with letters - all contribute to an amazing sense of elaborated surfaces.

Those signs are nearly gone in 1991, and the street is slick with asphalt. Most of the left side of State has been replaced by the frontage of 75 State Street. Built some ·20 years after One Boston Place and designed by Graham Gund, 75 State was a successful attempt to create an office tower that doesn't look like a packing crate. Burly stonework at the sidewalk deliberately recalls the past, and so do some of the materials, shapes, and colors. Yet 75 State is unmistakably of its own era. It is surfaced mostly in big, flat, smooth pieces of granite that could have been placed in position only by a crane, rather than laid up by the hands of masons. If there's a visible loss of human scale, there's also a breezy and bold inventiveness that offers its own kind of pleasure.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Overpowering Towering", Boston Globe, 1991

map not available at this time.

Location

State St & Congress St
Boston, MA 02109
United States

Nearby Items

State Street, Old State House		194 feet
Site of the Boston Massacre		357 feet
Fiske Building		462 feet
Old State House		466 feet
Untitled		527 feet
Polychrome Painted Star		528 feet
Wind Wind Wind		534 feet