Hold back your stones: Boston’s fantastic new glass houses

By Matt Haviland

William Rawn is a Boston architect. His firm was chosen last May as “the best architecture office in the United States.” Robert Campbell reviewed two new, local buildings of his and it looks like Mr. Rawn lives up to the hype.

Both are primarily made of glass. Apparently, glass is the way to look modern, and modern is the point for both of these new constructions. The “gem” of the two, as Campbell calls it, is the new wing of the Cambridge Library. Standing right next to the old wing, which Campbell considers a “minor masterpiece” already, glass is the first thing you notice. An entire, foreign wall of it.

What Rawn decided to do with the facade of this new building was take a recent European technology, have it manufactured in Germany, and bring it to America as the first and only wall of this type in the country. Two sheets of glass with a three-foot space in between, that space filled with shades which adapt to natural sunlight to control heat and glare. The glass is so clear that, when standing inside, it feels like you’re outside in the park. When looking into the building, you can see completely through it. Campbell wrote that the library’s goal was to “feel open and welcoming to everyone in the diverse community that is today’s Cambridge.”

However, the new wing isn’t just a glass wall with books. There are specific strategies at play. Susan Flannery, the library director, made some suggestions – possibly demands – about how best to attract readers and improve the library experience for everyone. First, and this may come as a given, you should be able to see books as soon as you walk in. Second, the windows have to work. Third, there must be a children’s area not in the basement, as many libraries apparently ‘tuck them away.’ Under a “leafy ceiling mural,” the kids section is on the third floor and meant to look like “an aerial treehouse.” Whether or not sticking children on the third floor is the same concept as tucking them into the basement, at least the space is made to look deliberate and fun.

Above all, Flannery wanted to mix the feeling of a library and a book store, which people seem to choose more and more over getting their books for free. The books are exclusively on open shelves, and they’re trying to get a nearby high school’s culinary program to host a bake sale there, reminiscent of the little coffee shops you find in today’s successful book retailers like Borders and Barnes and Noble. Campbell doesn’t comment on the effectiveness of Cambridge’s “hybrid” library theme, so it must speak for itself.

There were also renovations on the old wing of the Cambridge Library, which Campbell greatly appreciates. The oak walls and ceilings, as well as a 1934 mural, were “lovingly restored.” There is also a teen lounge, which, aside from its dozen public computers, is “lit like a party space” and packed with books “carefully selected to have absolutely nothing to do with the kids’ course work.” Even comic books have their place on the shelves, making this lounge sound like a ‘teenage hangout’ that teenagers might actually go to.

Campbell loves both wings, and just about everything William Rawn did with them. He is only concerned about the cost and effort to keep the glass wall maintained, which the city of Cambridge considers “a demonstration of a commitment to sustainability.” At 91 million dollars, only ten of which funded by the state, the renovated library is a big commitment already. But, according to Campbell, it’s fantastic, so the money has not yet been a waste.

The other Rawn project that Campbell discusses is the W Boston Hotel and Residences complex in Park Square. A twenty-six story glass giant, this building contains “235 hotel rooms and 123 condos, plus two bars, a restaurant, underground parking, and such yet-to-be-finished amenities as a health club and a nightclub.” Woo. Talk about complexity. Such an extensive, metropolitan sensibility is reflected clearly in the design – though the project’s scope may symbolically work against it.

Says Campbell – in a very poetic description of standing outside the building and looking up – “daylight seeps through” the building’s glass corners, which “seem to dissolve into thin air.” Hidden columns/beams let the glass be displayed without interruption as “a delicate, open-weave fabric that’s been stretched taut across the facades.”

Beautiful. Campbell also marvels at the experience of walking by and looking into the lobby, which is designed to look like an “outdoor cafe,” inside. The feeling is especially cool at night when the lobby, called The Living Room, is illuminated. But upon actually entering the building, we are hit with seemingly dozens of “themes.” Campbell lists them to an exhausting, or maybe just dizzying, extent. Everything is supposed to remind you of something else, varying from simple campfires to Harvard and MIT scenery to the Public Garden. What would be interesting and fun if reigned in to a couple of motifs instead feels “crowded,” even though it’s done with a level of elegance. The seating is apparently uncomfortable, too.

The hotel rooms, though, are “sexy without being camp,” and the restaurant, The Market, tries for a certain theme, fails to represent it, and yet is still an aesthetically pleasing visit. Robert Campbell talks about how Bostonians generally resist large buildings in favor of smaller, more comfortably historical architecture, but since the W is built within a row of pre-existing towers that don’t really touch Boston’s quainter neighborhoods, this isn’t a problem as much as a boost to the city’s skyline. As a building in Boston and a building in general, Campbell seems to appreciate the W Boston Hotel Rand Residences – just not without some design-related reservations.

Brief Campbell Biography: Robert Campbell graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A private practice architect since 1975, Campbell has worked on the improving/expanding institutions like The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and The Boston Symphony Orchestra, while also being “an urban design consultant to cities and… an adviser to the Mayors Institute for City Design” (Wikipedia). He even appeared in, and helped plan, “Beyond the Big Dig,” a TV series from 2002.

In 1997, Campbell was the American Academy in Rome’s architect-in-residence, so he has clearly “been there” in the architecture world as well as just critiquing it. He is also a poet (featured in Atlantic Monthly and Harvard Review), a teacher, and, of course, a columnist for The Boston Globe. In 1996, Campbell won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism – a prestigious award shared with the likes of Roger Ebert – and has received numerous other awards and honors, too.

He is not only a celebrated architect and critic but a genuinely good writer, who can make building structures and design plans more interesting than they should ever hope to be – at least to the architecturally oblivious public, of which I am a card-carrying member.

Robert Campbell is, at the most basic level, more than qualified to review your new building.