Architecture is a storytelling art. Architects have always imagined it is their work to explain a place and its people through form and material, light and shadow, and construction detail. It’s true. Buildings do tell stories. Their stories can inspire both the people who use them daily and those who only view them from a distance, imparting a sense of understanding—respect, even—for where and who they are. When we experience real architecture this is what we experience.
But here amid the complex and opposing forces of the 21st century, the stories that buildings tell are not always readily apparent. To be fair, this is not just the fault of architects or Architecture. Most of us do not spend our days examining the façades of buildings or carefully exploring their interiors to try to understand what they are telling us. Instead, cocooned in cars, we cruise past buildings at speeds that at best only allow us to glimpse them. For much of our time outdoors our attention is on the landscape of the road, not on architecture. And indoors, well, we have all these computer screens vying for our attention, don’t we?
And so we rely on critics to explain architecture, to put the stories of buildings into print and translate the language of architecture into English language. That’s what I do. For the past three years, I have been an architecture critic in Boston, Massachusetts. I write a column on architecture for Banker and Tradesman, a weekly newspaper in Boston. Begun in 1872 by the Warren family, who still own it, Banker and Tradesman is the real estate newspaper- of-record in Massachusetts. It is read by nearly 10,000 bankers, tradesmen (and -women), real estate brokers, mortgage lenders, contractors, developers, homebuyers, people who value architecture as a commodity but deserve to know more about its cultural and psychological value, too. The newspaper has cleverly titled my column “Design Matters.” It not only describes what I write about, but it telegraphs the paper’s editorial policy, as well: the editors believe design really does matter.
My road to writing about architecture began by becoming an architect. Plus, I teach architecture to undergraduates who plan to become architects themselves. My students are smart, creative, eager to ask not just “how to” but “what if.” I’m not worried about them; they very likely will become fine architects. But one of architecture’s stories is the relationship it describes. Architects are only half of that relationship. To make great architecture, architects need a constituency of great clients, developers, politicians, regular folks with vision who demand great architecture. Architecture needs people who know what they’re experiencing and who want more of it, people who understand architecture’s potential and demand it be fulfilled. The fact that such people seem somehow invisible in our culture does worry me.
A few years ago I let my colleagues know about my concern. “I want more people to understand more things about architecture,” I said.
“You should write something,” they said.
Next day, the telephone in my faculty office rang. The phone sits on a table awash in paper to the side of my desk. First ring. Papers to be graded, drawings to be checked, reports to be reported. The usual. The phone is under those papers. Second ring. I rush to find it and pick up the receiver before my voicemail will automatically answer. Third ring; I get it, a little breathless.
“Hello. It’s Jeff Stein.”
“Hello, Mr. Stein? I’m an editor of Banker and Tradesman in Boston.” She gave her name. “As you may know, for several years we have had an architecture critic at our newspaper.”
The editor named a well-known architecture writer, a respected author who had also been on the staff of a national architecture magazine in New York. I knew him and I liked his work. I had seen him on television discussing a book he had written.
“Our critic is leaving to go back to private practice and we must replace him right away. You come highly recommended.” Now I’m really breathless.
“When should I start?”
Right away. Did I want to read his columns to see how he did it?
No, I did not.
Could I suggest a building to write about as a kind of test for the newspaper?
Yes, I could.
The next morning I was an architecture critic, writing about buildings and ideas for an audience who, I imagine, really need to read about architecture to understand the city where they live, the city they are making everyday.
My job now is to think about buildings one after another, to meet and interview architects to find out what they had in mind, to describe the extent to which they were able to realize that, and explain it to readers. All on deadline. And all in Boston, America’s 4th fastest city, full of architects, institutions, high tech, high finance and higher education, and currently spending the last of $15 billion of Federal Highway Funds (the “Big Dig”) that have transformed the city’s infrastructure and still trickle down to design projects of all kinds.
In my Banker and Tradesman column, I have discussed how architecture functions as a government- protected monopoly; what “Building Science”—the physics of how buildings work as systems—has to offer us; how transparency in the form of more and more glass is coming to Boston, and how this movement actually began there almost 100 years ago through the pioneering passive solar designs of Boston architect William Atkinson.
I have written about architects like Hans Hollein, whose design for an office building for Harvard University was stopped by local citizenry; Steven Holl, whose new college dormitory in Cambridge, Simmons Hall at MIT, is meant to be seen at speed; and, of course, I have included stories of Californian Frank Gehry, whose fabulous new Stata Center here is befuddling the masses and draining the budget coffers of its university client.
But even more important than the work of these name-brand architects who visit my city from time to time is the everyday work of architects who are my neighbors: a visitor’s center in Concord; a series of new libraries in Boston; a courthouse in Lawrence, whose maple-paneled courtrooms, filled with sunlight, are like walking into a honey jar; Carol Johnson’s landscape design for the Battle Road Trail across historic farmsteads and woodlots in Minuteman National Park near Lexington, a truly uncommon experience in a common landscape.
J.B. Jackson, the writer and landscape historian who divided much of his professional life between teaching stints at Berkeley and Harvard said this: “To interpret landscapes accurately, we must turn to the common places of ordinary people.” It’s where we look for “Design Matters” around Boston and it’s where we find that design matters, too. It is no small thing that telling the stories of these designs is encouraged outright by my editor at Banker and Tradesman, Terence Egan, and that he defends and promotes my work to all comers. Such storytelling resulted last year in “Design Matters” receiving an award from the New England Press Association in the “Serious Writing” category.
I wasn’t expecting a forum like this, a situation that has me writing about architecture and design for newspaper readers in my own hometown. I think many more of these unexpected situations ought to erupt around the country. Architecture retains tremendous power and importance in our world. On average, Americans spend all but about an hour each day inside buildings. Whole forests are devoured to construct and maintain them. About half of all the fossil fuels we burn go to heat and cool and light them up. (The other half is spent transporting us between them.) And, of course, a building is the single most expensive thing most of us will ever purchase. The most expensive thing many of the companies we work for will ever purchase, too, both in terms of real dollars and in terms of the effect buildings have on the earth’s biosphere. There is an element of mystery to architecture. The mystery is not just in the architecture itself; the mystery is why more of us aren’t telling stories about it.
Author Jeffrey Stein, AIA, is the architecture critic for Banker + Tradesman newspaper, where this past year his work was awarded a New England Press Association prize. In addition, he is a practicing architect and a professor of architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. Mr. Stein is a frequent contributor to Architecture Boston magazine, and he is a renowned long-distance motorcyclist, currently writing a book about BMW motorcycle design. His wife, the art historian Emilie Altemose, reads his work before you do.
Photo illustration by Ragina Johnson.
Originally published 1st quarter 2004 in arcCA 04.1, “Press Check.”
