I’m talking about, as opposed to the residents, the people who aren’t. The city, the neighborhood that a new building fits into, and how it is affected by a new piece of property, whether or not that structure is artistic, aesthetic, or useful by itself. Robert Campbell’s article on the expanding Convention Center in Boston’s south waterfront is less a review (though he certainly gives his opinion on the structure that’s already there) but a warning, or maybe just an argument, against expansion – and a few ideas, if making it bigger is what Boston’s Convention Center Authority really thinks is the smartest course of action.

Apparently, the CCA just wants Boston to be a competitor. Other cities have bigger convention centers, and thus they have bigger conventions, which attract more people who spend more money and need more places to stay when they get here. Fine. That’s a noble economic goal for the city, but why might it render Boston ultimately less visitable?

The answer is charm. As Campbell argues, these buildings are steel monsters that take up large amounts of space and look bland at best (most times just obtrusive). Such a building “creates a dead zone around itself, as if it were some kind of toxic infection in the city.” Built far away from the center of Boston’s vivacity, our Convention Center makes pedestrians “feel alienated and unwelcome,” especially taking into account the “moat of traffic” that surrounds it. Clearly, though our center may contain “12 acres of indoor space,” its functional abilities come with the added cost of a big chunk of Boston real estate rendered, well, less functional than it could be for the parties not concerned with this week’s event. Which are usually the people who, um, live here.

However, Campbell lists two cities that have effectively integrated a convention center into their neighborhood. Integration is the key word for Philadelphia and San Francisco. With the latter’s Moscone Center, most of the building is underground, only “museums and a green park at ground level.” That sounds pretty unobtrusive. Philly’s Pennsylvania Convention Center is a single story high, “allowing Philadelphia and its streets and activities to flow continuously, without interruption, through and beneath it.” Both are centrally located, as opposed to throwing your convention center as far from society as your arm (and city limits) will allow. The Philadelphia Center in particular includes lots of restaurants and shops right up around it, so that one could walk by and do something else instead of having to weather a “useless no-man’s land” to avoid it. “Not great architecture by a long shot,” the PCC at least works with the city around it, and has glass lobbies and corridors to help you connect with your surroundings.

Campbell’s ideas for improvement of Boston’s Convention Center are to include public streets (instead of huge highways), have restaurants and attractions around it for those who don’t necessarily care about conventions, and to generally fit in with Boston so that people might want to take a walk through the area or stay awhile if that’s where they end up. With these improvements, which again concern the key word “integration,” “it might even do good for the South Boston waterfront.” For a city built on “walkability” and small-scale charm, it’s strange that Boston would be so far behind with making this sterile monolith fit in.

The expansions haven’t been built yet, so there’s still time to create a thriving, lively piece of urban renewal around what is now a flat line in the city’s otherwise steady architectural pulse. For my last blog about Campbell’s architecture review, what could be more appropriate than to cover Campbell’s ideas for a better city, as opposed to just his opinion of what’s already here? This is a seasoned man’s vision of how to fix something he sees as architecturally undeniably wrong. We would all do well to take note.

I met Robert Campbell under less than ideal circumstances, with a cup of Starbucks cappuccino that was less than warm. Microwaves and Blackberries can sometimes save the day.

The blue line train – which goes all the way to Wonderland if you let it – came to a stop in East Boston, where I thought I would be interviewing my journalist. The blustering highway between the T station and “his” street was an indication that I might, maybe, be in the wrong part of town… not to mention the graffiti or the fact that these house numbers stopped before 20, dozens less than his actual address.

After circling the block for twenty minutes, checking my Blackberry repeatedly for Google’s maps, and scaring the hell out of some woman taking out her garbage, I gave up. “Guess I really screwed up this one,” I thought, taking out my Blackberry and sending Campbell an e-mail. As I waited for the blue line train back to flashing civilization, the hardest challenge was not drinking the cappuccino (which I had promised Campbell but, twenty minutes late and in the wrong part of town, it seemed like a promise that was going to be broken).

It wasn’t. I kept the cappuccino by my side, looking at it but not giving in. Campbell’s response buzzed in my pocket on the train: I stood in Downtown Crossing’s T-station a few minutes later, coordinating the trip to my actual destination with a man who sounded a little annoyed (and rightfully so) but still willing to do the interview. I was going to be another half hour late, but he said it was fine and made sure I knew where I was going (he also explained that there are a lot of streets in Boston with that name).

Our interview was supposed to be at five – I pulled up to Campbell’s house around 6:10, having missed a t-stop since we last spoke and tried three different cabs before finding one that would take me where I needed to go. I walked into a much nicer house than any of the ones on his bizarro East Boston street and was greeted with friendliness – probably more than my crappy Google maps skills deserved. Campbell popped the cappuccino, hardly less than two hours old, into his microwave, asking if the cup was going to explode. Given the rest of my journey, it very well might have.

It didn’t, and we sat down to talk journalism.

“I’ve been very, very lucky,” started Campbell. He wouldn’t recommend his career path to anyone, based on the simple fact that it might be impossible to reproduce.  His story is labyrinthine series of coincidences and branching choices, starting with his attendance at Harvard and leading to an architecture firm, private practice architecture, and writing for Parade Magazine, for “a wonderful three years.” His established freelance criticism for The Boston Globe, without which I would have been interviewing someone else entirely, started by a heat-of-the-moment decision to take his family to a Columbia fund raising party. Few people really enjoy these things, but Campbell felt compelled to go. By chance, he talked to a Globe editor there, and that conversation led to his Pulitzer prize winning future with the newspaper.

A renaissance man is the proper term, and Campbell has done a lot, exploring both of his passions – architecture and writing – thoroughly (he has a wall plastered with awards for both). There was a ten year period where he “didn’t write a word,” however, and that’s when Campbell found that he couldn’t (psychologically) live on architecture alone. “I sort of have to write,” he said, echoing just about every true writer through the centuries.

“Why write about architecture?” is the question I forgot to ask, but Campbell brought it up himself. He called other critics “consumer guides” – it’s easy to see why people read reviews of new movies or shows or CD’s, but once a building goes up, a bad review isn’t going to tear it down (and a good one isn’t necessarily going to make people visit more frequently). The answer, then, is “because we live in it.” We live in architecture, so of course we should review it. What’s more important than our habitat?

Campbell finds buildings to review in several ways. Sometimes people send him information, or The Boston Globe suggests places that he really should cover – “I try to be alert to what’s going on.” Having picked a target, he always talks to the architect first. Since they’re just people, some architects express lots of insight into their work, but others just can’t articulate the process. On his tours, I wondered if the management ever tries to hide flaws or make things look better than they are. Campbell simply answered, “How would I know?”

When asked if he’s ever changed his mind about a piece of architecture, Campbell said “Absolutely.” It’s very embarrassing to “say good things about bad buildings and bad things about good buildings,” but it happens, and you feel terrible afterwards. As for negative responses, there are people who wouldn’t talk to Campbell for years after he gave their building a bad review. What he most cares about, and what show up in nearly all of his reviews, are the bigger ideas at hand. These buildings become “door(s) into larger issues,” and you can tell from my earlier blogs how each of them not only stands on its own but represents a concept.

Obviously the Pulitzer is Campbell’s most distinguished, or at least well known, award and accomplishment. “It was a complete surprise,” he said. That The Boston Globe picked him, an architecture critic, to submit ten pieces of writing for award consideration was surprising in itself. They have so many mainstream reviewers (movies, music, etc.), and Campbell has always been a freelance contributor anyway, never an “official” member of the staff.

But he won, and the prize “kind of oiled a lot of pathways.” He didn’t neglect to mention that “there have been a lot of little honors along the way.” Looking at the many plaques and certificates arranged in Campbell’s living room and study, that much was obvious.

His biggest piece of advice was to young people in general: “Travel all you can.”Just pick up a backpack and go. He has many favorite pieces of architecture, but mentioned The Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain (“that place from the song”) and the Kimbell Gallery in Fort Worth, Texas as two of his foremost picks (and cited Frank Lloyd Wright as a favorite architect). His descriptions of those buildings, which I couldn’t write quickly enough to copy, were as poetic sitting in his living room as they are on the pages of The Boston Globe. For The Alhambra Palace, Campbell said something about “always emerging from some dark corridor into… [what I'm assuming to be a great burst of light].” I cursed not having a tape recorder.

I left Campbell’s house elated to have gotten the interview, even though I had been through the entire city of Boston and arrived over an hour late (having applied several two dollar charges to my Charlie Card and distributed almost an entire twenty dollar bill between cab drivers). Time is certainly money, and I was just happy that Robert could afford to give me extra (and be so understanding about doing so). The lessons in architecture reviewing and journalism were fantastic, but well rivaled by the ones I learned getting there.

Buildings are all well and good. Some are purely functional, and others – like most of the buildings reviewed by Robert Campbell – have some interesting aesthetic touch or motif. However, except for those abandoned, buildings are defined by their residents. This is something usually untouched by architecture reviews, and certainly left out by pamphlets and encyclopedic descriptions, but it’s possibly the most important part of the equation: how do all these angles and measurements affect the people who spend time, even entire lives, working around them?

Of course a college like MIT would be the rare party responsible for thinking, “well, why not theme our new building around the scientists who are going to live there.” World famous Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki was happy to oblige. His new extension to MIT’s Media Lab in Cambridge is not only fascinating from an artistic and gut-level perspective, but serves many purposes to make sure that these lab rats can share their brilliance in a nearly Facebook-esque fashion.

Like hundreds of user profiles amassed on the same page, each one posting news or quoting Lil’ Wayne, every member of MIT’s Media Lab will be able to see multiple other groups at once. Due to nothing but transparent glass walls, you can stand in, say, the central atrium and “look into the labs of half a dozen research teams.” The underlying theory is that “most of the exciting work in science occurs at the boundaries between disciplines.” At the original Media Lab, people from different sciences (and even arts) congregated in “a nearly windowless box” to conduct their own separate research, while keeping their eyes open to the work going on around them. This way, the students were never at a loss for random outside inspiration.

The new building lets that theory virtually wash over it, bleeding away all visual boundaries between sciences. With different groups working in close proximity, thoroughly visible to each other (and if the glass wasn’t transparent enough, there are video screens too), the atmosphere is ripe for mixing ideas. In the building’s two atriums, “at whatever level you’re on, you’re at the bottom floor of some of the two-story labs and at the top floor of others.” Campbell observes that it “feels laced together with imaginary diagonals,” enhanced by “a boldly colored stair.” A person must feel almost naked, performing experiments in an environment so consciously striving to put you on display. No secrecy can be had here, and by the 90 million dollar price tag, some important people must consider absolute openness the way to go.

A courtyard designed by Richard Fleischner, various top-floor event rooms, and a roof terrace overlooking the Boston skyline round out the building. But as I was getting at before, these features mean nothing if people aren’t using them. For such a functional, aware building, they seem like afterthoughts. Not to say an extra room or two won’t be helpful when you have a scientific event to host, or that the courtyard wouldn’t be a nice place to stroll through on your way to the lab. Just that the rest of this building is stunningly assured of the fact that these people are here to congregate and these walls are here to not get in their way. Any extra touches are just pleasant frames.

At the same time, not every building can be so laser pointed towards a certain goal. Emerson College’s academic buildings, for example, are packed with different features that are useful only to those involved. A student might never set foot in the Walker Building’s study rooms if they already have a quiet place to work. There are floors in the Ansin Building that many of us will never even see. And some dramatic design feature like every wall being made of transparent glass just wouldn’t work for everyone.

The final analysis concludes that even though buildings should serve their inhabitants, there isn’t usually a practical way to make that happen. Unless it’s literally an extension to a laboratory at MIT, too many people are going to need too many different things from a given structure to make pointed design motifs the way to go. After all, most buildings are only necessary to keep us walled away from the streets and capped off from the sky. They are just enclosed spaces, after all, and if the MIT scientists really wanted openness between separate projects, they could have set up their labs in a field. But the fact that they got one of the world’s premiere architects to create a glass box specifically, creatively suited to their needs is cool, and for those who can use it, the new extension to MIT’s Media Lab should be a great habitat for all kinds of unexpected scientific breakthroughs.

The rest of us can live just as opaquely as usual.

Anyone who read The Road by Cormac McCarthy (or traveled on a similarly apocalyptic adventure to find a movie theater that actually plays the film) knows how bleak our planetary future might be. Sure, roving bands of cannibals might seem a little much, but what really will befall us once the environment finally crumbles under our industrial pressure and we are forced to live off the land? Whatever it is, the answer might begin with some forward-thinking architecture.

Robert Campbell reviewed a “cohousing” village recently built south of Petersborough, New Hampshire. It’s called the Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm. Designed by David O’Neil and Sheldon Pennoyer, these 29 old-country styled houses form what Campbell calls “a kind of Shaker colony with computers.” Originating in Denmark, the idea behind cohousing is to have families live in separate houses but come together at common facilities to eat, have meetings, get mail, etc. The surroundings are very woodland and natural, and occupants’ cars (yes, they’re still allowed to drive) are all parked in “one corner of the village.” From there, residents get out and walk to their houses. Just one of the ways this setup hopes to preserve the environment.

The real conservation is less visible. As Campbell states, “energy consumption is as close to zero as you can get.” Wood pellets are burned in a central boiler to provide heat and hot water for the entire community, without using any fossil fuels (the pellets are provided by Jaffrey, a nearby town that has no problem contributing because the pellets are “waste lumber” to begin with). “Sealed and insulated so tightly against the weather” that annual heating/water costs are only around $900 combined, this is a good deal for both the planet and customers. Aside from a few free-standing houses, most of them are condos. However, with each property boasting two floors and an attic, “ground-floor heat rises naturally to fill the volume.”

Campbell lists other features, such as the ease of building an additional room/adding a porch to each house, and the fact that most of them were built on sites of previous architecture, “so as to leave the best farm soil untouched.” Due to zoning laws, a whopping 95 percent of these cohousing villages ever see construction. But environmental movements are trying to change those laws. After all, what could be bad about such an Earth-friendly concept? Most of the residents are “in hi-tech occupations, often self-employed and working at least partly from home,” which gives the impression that these are smart, successful people – as opposed to the hippies and technologically-phobic crowds you might expect in a nature-friendly farming commune.

Campbell calls the Nubanusit Neighborhood “a gem of unpretentious architecture.” It is a Swiss Famil(ies) Robinson, if you will. Looking beyond the niche groups of Earth-conscious consumers (well-educated as they might be), these communes seem like a huge solution to many of America’s, and the world’s, problems. Food? Done. You grow your own in addition to what you can buy at the store. Energy conservation? Extreme. Fossil fuel use? Almost nonexistent, except when the residents get in their cars and drive somewhere else.

Given recently updated predictions on global warming, which explain that even the best possible outcome will result in total terra-disaster, we need more communites like this. Yes, the architecture is aesthetically appealing, but beyond that, it is truly green. Not just a recycled paper cup for your Starbucks latte, this is an climate-responsible way of life, and it doesn’t sound at all challenging when looking at the benefits. Why world governments haven’t been looking into this as a sure way to validate their many promises for a cleaner and better Earth is… well, it’s an aggravating question.

Many of the answers have been hiding between the digits of our heating bills and in the constantly refilling empty spaces in our gas tanks. The Earth will probably not be saved by how many generations your most trendy coffee cup has been through; it might stand a fighting chance, however, if you bring that cup back to a community that isn’t wasting our resources quite so much. Since buildings and utilities are such a huge part of our modern lives, we should look to them first when figuring out how to solve our modern problems. If they can help prevent the doomsday theories that our scientists are soberly graphing for us, maybe the future will be less like The Road and more like, well, the way it was when farming communites weren’t just Amish curiosities and unpretentious “gems” – when they were the norm. Maybe living off the land can be the norm once again, because if we don’t start doing it soon, the land will be hard-pressed to support us at all.

Not just another snappy Robert Campbell review of this week’s new building, A model for the future with an eye to the past is a feasible plan for saving our planet. At the very least, an excellent step forward that only requires a couple of small steps back.

Ted Gup – Emerson College’s current Journalism Chair – described it as “the second in an ongoing and informal forum of exploring journalism and the challenges it faces.” Dozens of wide-eyed journalism students witnessed something more: two seasoned newspaper veterans sitting down and saying, “Well, things look bad now, but we can only do the best we can and hope that newspapers still exist when you guys have degrees.”

The Boston Globe’s soon-to-be retired publisher, Stephen Ainsley, sat down with the Globe’s editor, Marty Baron, on November 19th, 2009 to answer questions about their newspaper’s hectic past year and the House of Usher-esque coming era for newspapers as a whole. The discussion, held in Emerson’s Semel Theater, was at first heavily driven by Gup, who read monologues and questions from a thick, well-prepared, and passionately written stack of pages. Ainsley and Baron’s attendance was not taken for granted, which Gup stressed repeatedly.

The three sat before Emerson’s aspiring journalists like old friends, laughing and sharing stories, not at all uptight about their profession or gloomy about declining sales. Having been described as ‘the romantic one,’ Marty Baron was surprisingly stiff compared to the jovial yet business-minded Stephen Ainsley. In what may have been the most interesting portion of their discussion, Ainsley told the students about how he originally wanted to be a reporter, and only out of necessity took a position selling ads for a small paper. From there, he scaled the marketing ranks. “I just kind of started down the path and never left it,” said Ainsley, who never did become a reporter. He seemed, nonetheless, satisfied.

Baron, who spoke with less comfort, described his journey from working on high school and college papers, interning as a journalist, and getting job offers right out of college. A more traditional success story, but an interesting example of where dedication and hard work can take one in their chosen field – especially considering how bleak the future of print journalism appears to be.

Even the recent past has been plagued with struggle. About their recent trials with newspaper sales, Ainsley outlined the many cuts and drawbacks The Boston Globe had to suffer in order to stay afloat. Baron grumbled about efficiency advisers employed to watch his staff. When the advisers finally left, they shook his hand and asked if there was anything else they could do for him. Baron tried his hardest not to say, “you can get the hell out of here.”

Clearly, there was tension between the Globe’s business side – which also forced Baron to make a tough phone call, telling his international office that the Globe could no longer support them – and its reporters, who tried their hardest to stay motivated amidst pay cuts and layoffs. Despite the inherent drama, there was no discernible unpleasantness between Ainsley and Baron, who both understood the widening gap between ideal circumstances and paying the bills.

When asked about what an effective future business model would look like, Ainsley chuckled and said, “If I knew that, I probably wouldn’t be retiring.” Both men talked about how, even though their core subscribers remain loyal, most of the Globe’s current audience is online. Gup brought up Boston.com’s staggering rate of five million unique monthly visitors, from all over the world. Their average time spent on the website totals 20 minutes a month. This is a foreign concept for what Ainsley described as an industry “proud of the fact” that making changes is like “turning a battleship.” Ideas were discussed about how to charge people for reading articles online without them simply going to a free site instead. One of the more interesting options was putting annoying ads on news websites that readers can disable by paying a small monthly fee, which will make news sites more money than advertising alone.

Ted Gup mentioned how optimistic – “effervescent” – Baron sounded over lunch. The editor seemed cautiously confident, imagining the ‘journalist of the future’ as “a person who embraces change and uncertainty” and “a bit of an entrepreneur.” This ideal journalist would work more independently, as opposed to starting with a small-town paper and paying dues until moving and becoming loyal to a larger paper.

“We both have missions that transcend pure commercialism; there’s a certain romance about what we do,” said Gup, comparing the business of private colleges to the journalism industry. He opened with this statement, but it echoed throughout the discussion. Not only relative to the Globe, one could imagine every newspaper in America undertaking similar measures and struggles to succeed in these internet-dominated times. As Ainsley said, “it’s hard to compete with free,” but the industry is trying their best. A new sales model may be just around the corner, and both guests seemed ready for whatever comes at them. If anything, this meeting must have been a boost to the spirit of every student who attended. These men are at the top, and if they haven’t given up, that’s enough of a reason to believe that someday the internet and the written news story can finally support each other.

Few buildings are as much fun from the outside as the Greater Boston Food Bank. Officially known as the Yawkey Distribution Center, this structure is described by Robert Campbell as a “billboard,” and employs a magic optical trick that you might see.

Since it is a food bank, you wouldn’t think architecture was much of a focus. Said the designer, Tom Sieniewicz, “every dollar you save is two meals.” But that didn’t keep him from creating what Campbell referred to as a “gem.” This “architectural message board” of a building has some of the coolest concepts, both practical and industrially artistic, that I’ve ever heard of. The building façade is dull gray with “The Greater Boston Food Bank” written in big red letters like, yes, a billboard, and 596 strange “wedge shaped markers” that stick out the front. This seemingly random feature is actually a hidden message – if you look at the building at the exact right moment on south 93, all of the red markers converge into the image of a wheat plant, which is the company’s logo.

The creativity and obscure messages don’t stop outside. When visitors arrive, they are first taken around a catwalk positioned high up in this building which is, at its most basic, a warehouse. It is skylit, you can see the literal tons of food, and according to Robert Campbell, makes “you feel like you’re on parade.” The presentation itself is full of exposed steel framing, going to no lengths to disguise the fact that this is still just an area for food to be shipped. However, Campbell notes how natural light pours in through the white polystyrene paneled walls, so that “occasional bright colors play against the steel.”

As for the symbolic, artistic side of things, there’s a “rough black circle with a cross in it” carved into the concrete floor. People see this upon entering, and its meaning goes way back to the Great Depression, where the homeless people would leave a similar symbol in scratched coal outside houses where they were well-treated and fed. Since the food bank is a virtual macrocosm of those good Samaritans, they have the right to stamp that old symbol where everyone can see it. What’s extraordinary is that they had the artistic intent to do so.

About concerns of whether the design, with its hidden pictures and obvious lettering, would be a dangerous distraction to drivers, Campbell mused that “viewing a screen” is nearly the same thing as “counting cows.” Since cows probably won’t be outlawed anytime soon, this building probably won’t face the legal ramifications that forbade WGBH to hang an electric screen over the turnpike in Brighton a few years ago. Hidden messages are only there for a fraction of a second, so that’s the exact amount of time they could remain a distraction. Thus, even though the Food Bank was also turned down for having an electric message board over I-93, they creatively worked around it.

“The highest calling of an architect is to help the community,” said Sieniewicz. Robert Campbell thinks that he might sound a little old-fashioned saying that, but completely agrees with the man’s methods. In fact, he notes that it was a tough job designing this building without “descending into Vegas-like kitsch” or making it a “giant TV,” like many of the newer works in Times Square. Campbell doesn’t consider that architecture at all, but he calls this “a great achievement,” and knowing that 30 million pounds of food filter through The Greater Boston Food Bank every year, feeding 83,000 mouths a week through nearly 700 agencies, this privately owned (but state and city-helped) charity is not only a feat of architecture but a testament to human compassion. It deserves to show its message to the world, even if part of that message can only be seen in split-second bursts.

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.

Would you want to live at the mall? Many Americans might say yes. Robert Campbell says, “well, maybe after a couple of renovations.”

Legacy Place, a new open-air mall (or “lifestyle center,” as they’re officially called), is trying to make changes in the way we shop, but as Campbell points out, the changes aren’t quite evident enough to matter. Built like a “big square figure eight” and stranded between Interstate 95 and Route 2, this is a mall of sidewalks and stores facing outward, where you park your car and walk in the fresh air between stores like Urban Outfitters and The Gap, to grocery places like Whole Foods, and even to a bowling alley/sports bar. Legacy Place wants to be a town square, a Main Street, a place that grew organically.

Yes, there is also a movie theater. How did you guess? Probably because the main – and apparently only – difference between this and a normal, more enclosed shopping mall is that it’s open to the weather. With 40 acres of stores to choose from, it’s certainly big. But Robert Campbell had suggestions for further Main Street style elements, including day care centers, tailor shops, watchmakers, post offices, hardware stores, gardens, etc. He found that, in making the experience entirely based on buying ‘things’ – as opposed to services – it doesn’t feel like a small town. He also pointed out that the businesses are ones you would see at any mall in America. It would probably help Legacy Place’s sense of “quaint” to put in a few stores that aren’t owned by rich men in New York City office towers. Adding to the corporate aspect is some upstairs rentable office space.

Campbell wondered if the Boston winters would pose a problem. According to the designer, Richard Askin, there were people who asked that during the construction process. Says Askin, “it hasn’t been true.” Depending on how new this mall is, maybe it hasn’t been true because it isn’t winter yet.

Of the architecture, Campbell was unimpressed but unoffended. Developed by W/S Development, the specific designers (Cambridge’s Prellwitz Chilinski firm) worked at one time under Ben Thompson, the creator of Faneuil Hall. Legacy Place is supposed to look like an assortment of buildings that each have their own distinct personality, as if each came there of its own accord and at a separate time period. Campbell calls it “far from memorable but easy to take.” He observed that, at worst, there is a sense of flat modernism, and at best, the shopkeepers are trying to compete with and stand out from each other, “the kind of sense you get in any up-and-coming ethnic neighborhood in any real city.”

Legacy Place appears to be a serviceable mall. It isn’t completely finished, but what is there is architecturally, if not thematically or realistically, reminiscent of what it’s trying to remind us: Main Street. The fact that you have to get on the highway (or take a T-ride) to get there makes the whole experience a little more detached, and a little less convenient. Not to mention less homey. Robert Campbell was not appalled, nor was he satisfied. Lifestyle centers are apparently a big up-and-coming trend in shopping malls, and Legacy Place is trying to be the most lifelike of all. The results are a place you can bring the family, but not one where you would particularly want to live.