Shaped by Bostonian Civility

By Wolf Von Eckardt

The $500 million Copley Place fits in with Back Bay, almost

Like all living organisms, cities are constantly changing. One American city that seems to manage technological and economic change without sacrificing its essential character is Boston. Its residents have kept their new downtown, with its forthright and boldly sculptural city hall, the Faneuil Hall festival market and converted granite warehouses along the waterfront, as Bostonian as Bunker Hill. Now they are managing to control drastic changes in the famed Back Bay neighborhood. The latest and most dramatic case in point is Copley Place, a $500 million shopping, office and hotel complex that opens this week. The development might have been another alien invader of the city, like such self-centered and gaudy projects as Renaissance Center in Detroit and Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. But surprisingly, Copley Place almost fits in. There seems enough of Boston's old civic mettle left to have forced a certain architectural civility upon the development.

At the turn of the century, Back Bay was all genteel opulence and social superiority, magnificently expressed by Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church and McKim, Mead & White's public library on Copley Square. In the 1950s the area began to slide into a comfortable shabbiness. Most of the grand houses were converted into private schools, dormitories and offices, or divided into small apartments and rooming houses. Shops proliferated. In 1965 the clumsy 52-story-high Prudential Center rose incongruously on Boylston Street. It was followed by the 60-story mirror-glass John Hancock tower and other tall buildings. This "highrise spine," as planners call it, formed an impressive skyline but failed to mitigate the disaster on the ground: early in the 1960s, 9.5 acres of living, breathing, historic city right next to Copley Square was torn up to form a sunken tangle of railroad tracks and turnpike ramps. The gash also divided the Back Bay and South End neighborhoods.

Copley Place was built on top of the turnpike mess. The hole in the urban fabric has become a rose-and-beige-striped building complex, housing two hotels (36 and 38 stories high, with a total of nearly 2,000 rooms), four seven-story office buildings, shopping galleries with 100 restaurants and stores (including such glossy names as Neiman-Marcus, Tiffany, Gucci and Saint Laurent), a nine-screen movie house and parking for 1,432 cars.

The developer, Chicago's Urban Investment & Development Co., a subsidiary of Aetna Life & Casualty, became interested in Copley Place through its senior vice president, Kenneth A. Himmel, 37, who grew up in the Boston area. "We are aiming at an entirely new market," explains Himmel. "Silicon Valley is moving east. The bright young people in the electronic and related industries are attracted by Boston's unusual cultural, scientific and educational facilities, if not to settle and work there, at least to visit, meet and consult. Back Bay, with its new railroad station and freeway exits, is just the place for them."

The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, which owns and leases the Copley Place air rights, and the Office of State Planning insisted only that Himmel's firm "subject its plans to a vigorous citizen review." Architect Tunney Lee, 52, former chief of planning design at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, was engaged to work with residents. The resulting citizens' review committee held some 50 sessions, attended by 30 to 40 representatives of neighborhood associations and labor, business and civil rights groups. Himmel was glad to cooperate to avoid costly delays, painfully aware that bitter citizen opposition had recently obstructed Park Plaza, a proposed 50-story development overlooking Boston's public garden. "We see citizens' review as a creative opportunity," he says.

Lee estimates that the citizens' committee got about 65% of what it asked for. Among the concessions it won: employment priority for people living in the neighborhood and the inclusion of 100 housing units, a quarter of them low income, even though Copley Place did not displace anyone.

The review committee's greatest concern, however, was to have this huge project serve both the Back Bay and South End neighborhoods and to make it an integral part of the city. The designers, the Architects Collaborative, Inc., with Howard F. Elkus as the principal in charge, somewhat--but, alas, far from entirely--overcame the joyless-fortress syndrome. The composition of the building masses is pleasing. It starts low at the Copley Square side, nicely mending the turnpike damage done there, and steps up to the scale of the Prudential building on the other side. The saving graces of the design are three portals, with dramatic glass canopies, and some sizable glass panels in odd places. The panels afford people within the building views of some of the landmarks outside, giving them a sense of place.

The interior, however, could be in New York City's Trump Tower, Chicago's Water Tower Place, Houston's Galleria or any of several other vacuously luxuriant shopping centers that seem designed for a latter-day Marie Antoinette. Here the architects became tacky in an orgy of salmon-colored tile and Spanish marble, brass and rosewood, fountains and vegetation and, naturally, a waterfall sculpture. Copley Place's two-level shopping mall is a catalogue of high-priced interior-decorator cliches.

Kitsch, however, is bearable and can even be fun if there is an easy escape. From Copley Place, you step out into Boston rather than some endless suburban parking lot. --By Wolf Von Eckardt