The Thompson Sampler
ARCHITECTURE BOSTON
The Thompson Sampler
Five buildings, five views of an architectural legacy.
By Elizabeth S. Padjen FAIA
BOYLSTON HALL, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Cambridge, Massachusetts
When Ben Thompson, then a principal of The Architects Collaborative, remodeled Harvard’s Boylston Hall in 1959, it had already undergone a century of expansion and renovation. But none of the previous modifications was as startling or influential as his thoroughly Modern approach.
Originally designed by Paul Schulze as a chemistry laboratory and museum, Boylston Hall was built in 1857 in an Italian Renaissance style. In 1871, Peabody & Stearns topped the Italian palazzo base with a Second Empire mansard story, providing an additional floor. Over the next 50 years, the building was renovated several more times.
In 1959, Harvard hoped to build a center for the study of modern languages on the site of Boylston Hall but was constrained by the terms of the donor’s bequest from razing the antiquated building. Charged with remodeling the structure, Thompson faced an ambitious task, requiring a 40 percent increase in floor area.
Unlike Peabody & Stearns, Thompson and his team intended to transform the building from the inside. The solution was to insert new floors into the monumental floor-to-floor heights of the original building — in effect, inserting a new office building into the historic structure. Two principles of European Modernism were well suited to this problem: the “free plan,” a floor plan that serves as a neutral canvas; and the “free façade,” a building enclosure that is untied to the organization of the interior space. But the Boylston “free façade” was not a Modern construction at all; it was instead the historic granite mass.
The architects showcased their Modern interior through sheets of glass fitted to the stone openings with minimal steel frames, inventing a new window system incorporating a spandrel panel to accommodate the new floor level and a minimal vertical mullion to allow office partitions to be framed to the center of the window openings. This treatment radically transformed the architecture of the building.
The appeal of the design was immediate. First, in an environment in which tradition was revered, it had a refreshingly subversive quality: the new design brilliantly opposed the restraints of the building’s history and multiple styles. Second was its utopianism. New office floors replaced the historic stair hall and chambers with neutral space; people animated the building. Third was its assertion of flexibility; its repetitive elements offered an aesthetic of systems design that was synonymous with the Modern Movement.
Thompson’s solution is still powerful because of its unspoken connections to the traditions of American Modernism. Providing views to the interior was a generous act of openness unique in Harvard Yard, where buildings were typically shuttered by the grill-like character of historic windows; it continues to be an invitation to engage in the building. The drive to reduce and simplify, dramatized in this design through the geometry of wall and void, is a fundamentally American impulse at the root of this country’s embrace of Modernism; here was a historic building that was suddenly spare and abstract. Finally, Thompson’s precise aesthetic reveals a reverence for craft as a fusion of beauty and usefulness; historic granite and modern glass are valued equally and brought into a harmony independent of traditional styles.
Ben Thompson’s work evolved from these qualities of engagement, abstraction, and craftsmanship by always transforming problems into aesthetic opportunities. His was the anti-authoritarian world of the craftsman and artist who builds with material fact, speaks of common life, and invents from necessity. Thompson’s work was cool in the ’60s because it reflected the aspirations of its time. The lesson of Boylston Hall today is a vision of tradition invigorated by modern life, of past and present beautifully joined in the contrast of the abstract order of its architecture and the emotional impact of stone and glass.
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