CultureNOW - Salada Building: Densmore, Le Clear and Robbins and Peter Vanderwarker

Salada Building

Architect
Densmore, Le Clear and Robbins

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Recycling old spaces for new uses has become a major industry in Boston in recent years. A police station has become an art institute, and a naval shipyard has become a residential neighborhood. Apartments have been made from garages, schools, factories, and churches, while shopping arcades have transformed a wholesale market, a railroad station, an arsenal, and an auto assembly plant.

Grill 23 & Bar, a restaurant in the Back Bay, is one such recycled space. It occupies what was once the office floor of the Salada Tea Company on Stuart Street at Berkeley. The Salada Building was designed by the firm of Densmore, Le Clear and Robbins in 1927 and is famous for something that doesn't show in these photos: its exterior doors, which are cast in bronze and depict scenes from the tea trade (including some memorable elephants), designed by an English artist named Henry Wilson.

The earlier of these photos probably dates from soon after the building opened. It shows the major clerical space, where tea shipments from all over the world were brokered. Although the architecture is Roman, with fat Corinthian columns, the decor is Chinese, including a sculptured dragon, lacquered cabinets, and Oriental carpets and tapestries. The employees are bent to their tasks with what may be just a little too much concentration, probably in awareness of the photographer. In the new photo, taken from the same point, public relations director Gayle Driscoll and assistant steward Battista Wladmillson stand near the same column at which the boss stood in the old photo. The floor has been raised to create a mezzanine, a wall has been removed, and other changes have been made, but the space still seems much the same. Even the old office chairs have been meticulously replicated for the restaurant.

Recyclings like this are most successful, paradoxically, when the new use doesn't fit too neatly into the old container. It is precisely the slight misfit of old and new - the incongruity of eating dinner in a brokerage hall, with the odd little nooks and spatial relationships that result - that gives such places their charm. The success of remodelings like this one raises larger issues about architecture. The Modern movement, for instance, was based largely on the principle that "form follows function." But when a radically different function such as dining can be contained so pleasantly in an old form such as a brokerage hall, what becomes of the principle?

The truth is that form shouldn't follow function too closely, for the simple reason that a building's functions usually change during its life. The best buildings are not those that are cut, like a tailored suit, to fit anyone set of functions, but rather those that are strong enough to retain their character as they accommodate different functions over time.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - The Inside Story", Boston Globe, 1 September 1985

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Location

330 Stuart Street
Boston, MA 02116
United States

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