AIA Guide to Boston: Contemporary Landmarks, Urban Design, Parks, Historic Buildings And Neighborhoods

The AIA Guide to Boston, 2008, by Susan and Michael Southworth, is a splendid book. I read it cover to cover and loved every minute. I walk around Boston a lot and look at buildings along the way. But this Guide, with its lively stories and opinions, opened my eyes to how rich our buildings are and how much more there is to see and know about building design and local history. When the weather improves, a friend to whom I gave a copy and I are going to walk all over looking, looking.... I am reminded of a line from Dr. Seuss's first book, And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, "Marco, keep your eyes up and see what you can see." Ann Hershfang

Boston, America's London, is such an awesome ensemble of urban architecture that any author is presented with both a formidable task and the enjoyment of endless variation. With such an enormous canvas, the resulting work can be either a sloppy, undisciplined patchwork or a masterpiece. This little book is a masterpiece. What can I say? It's exactly what an AIA-sponsored architecture catalog should be. The selection of sites is diverse, interesting and distinguished. The essays for each site are complete: They're long enough to be instructive and short enough to keep your attention. The photographs are all monochrome, but they're large, numerous and of revealing composition as to add real value to the text. There's no long introductory essay, but a simple preface to introduce the city and the book, and there's a nice set of simple, functional maps in the appendices. The binding and the pages are sturdy to allow for hands-on field work as well as browsing. In many ways, this book resembles the AIA Guide to Detroit, which is also a benchmark for the AIA-sponsored series. As for the architecture... Anyone familiar with Boston and the surrounding towns knows that there are thousands of noteworthy sites. This book captures about 600 of the best of them, and your favorite sites are sure to be in here, be they buildings, parks or public artwork. Since historic sites play such an important role in Boston's urban cohesion, they are appropriately represented here. Important modern structures aren't neglected either. In fact, Boston includes a real critical mass of fascinating modern buildings, all appropriately included as well. Surprising to me is that Boston contains less colonial and Federal architecture than one might expect from its reputation and history as a colonial metropolis. There are few dense areas of unspoiled colonial or Federal urbanism, Beacon Hill and Charlestown being the obvious exceptions; rather, colonial and Federal sites tend to be widely distributed throughout the modern city. Maybe I'm just stating the obvious, but the city doesn't have the cohesive historical atmosphere and quaint sensuality of places like Charleston, South Carolina and Providence, Rhode Island, for example. It's more like Washington, DC, with its historic enclaves at Georgetown and Alexandria. That's not a bad thing, of course, but just an observation. Boston has its share of fire, neglect and urban renewal nightmares too, as this guide carefully notes. Two inexplicable omissions: Harvard Business School and the Radcliffe College buildings. Fenway, with its mindboggling cluster of important institutions, gets a bit of the short end as well. The catalog stays largely focused within the Boston city limits, but there are nice, (almost) complete excursions to Harvard, MIT and the neighborhoods surrounding those important institutions. Each chapter begins with a brief essay describing the history, general character and orientation of the p