Into modern architecture

Boston - The Hub, between innovative drive and past

[Tripper: Paola]

IT

Although Boston has played an important role in the history of the United States of America and as a testimony to a small historical heritage, one cannot fail to admire its iconic modern architecture.
The city is home to gems that are the material expression of the ideas of some of the world's most famous architects. In addition to the aesthetic judgment, it is necessary to look at the message enclosed in the lines, in the use of materials, in the composition of the interior spaces. The review of buildings is distributed in the city perimeter but has a higher concentration around the university poles.

The Ray and Maria Stata Center

MIT Chapel

Simmons Hall, designed by Steven Holl in 2002, is a square-shaped student dormitory reminiscent of a building brick.
The porous, sponge-like structure, thanks to the thousands of windows, has been designed to bring natural light into the heart of the building. The light here becomes a metaphor for itself: the light that illuminates the minds to encourage students to interact, to communication that becomes comparison.
The Chapel of MIT, the most recognized technological institute in the world, was designed by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, also designer of the nearby Kresge Auditorium and Kresge Oval. The exterior of the chapel looks like a brick cylinder, without decorations, without windows, surrounded by a concrete moat. The chapel is surmounted by an aluminum spire but the overall result is rather lackluster. Inside, the brick walls have a wave movement designed around the small marble altar, surrounded by an extraordinary cascade of light.
Eero seems to want to tell us that beauty is within things. Only when you reach the interior you discover that the spirit lives there, flooded with light.

Still on the MIT campus, the Ray and Maria Stata Center, designed by the American architect Frank Gehry, deserves a nomination. The center, completed in 2004, has columns that draw frightening corners, walls that suddenly turn and collide with random curves, materials that change constantly: bricks, mirror steel, brushed aluminum, brightly colored paints, corrugated sheets. All this variety becomes a metaphor for freedom, audacity and creativity, all that is essential in the field of research, and brings outside what happens in the classrooms inside.
A little further on, there is the Media Lab, an interdisciplinary research laboratory, a temple of multimedia, art and design. The building, designed by Fumihiko Maki in association with Leers Weinzapfel from Boston, is an example of classic modernism: a form of glass and steel wrapped in an elegant aluminum screen.

Just outside the city (Dorchester), however, the Kennedy Library and Museum is located, an elegant structure in concrete and glass, designed by the architect IM Pei, to celebrate the blood relationship between the city and what would become one of the most famous presidents of American history. The structure faces the sea like a large ship, in memory of this passion of JFK.
Next to it is the Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, dedicated instead to his brother Edward M. Kennedy, known as Ted. The institution has the educational purpose of leading the visitor by the hand in understanding the mission and work of the Senate, also experimenting the tasks of the senators and the mechanism of debate, negotiation and voting of the laws. Observing the outdoor spaces, one immediately captures the harmony and rediscovers the meaning of the topics discussed inside

And when you are loaded with so much modernity you can go back in American history by following the Freedom Trail. After all, Boston is a perfect combination of styles and times, a hub where ancient and current threads intertwine.