NowBoston

Architecture

Architecture in Boston

Boston's architecture belongs largely to its universities, which have been hiring architects from outside the city for a century and building what the city itself would not. Most of it stands on two campuses and along one river.

• MFA, Art of the Americas Wing

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  Completed 2010

  Norman Foster

  An addition to the Museum of Fine Arts, roughly doubling the space for its American collections. Norman Foster set a glass block between two granite pavilions and roofed the courtyard beside it, turning a leftover space into the museum's main room. The granite came from the same Maine quarry as the original building. The wing restores an axis the museum had lost through a century of piecemeal additions.

• Institute of Contemporary Art

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  Completed 2006

  Diller Scofidio + Renfro

  A museum on the harbour in the Seaport district. Diller Scofidio + Renfro cantilevered the top-floor gallery out over the waterfront walk, so the mass is held above the public route instead of blocking it. A grandstand of timber steps runs down the harbour side and is roofed by that cantilever. The gallery above has a single window, placed so the harbour becomes the exhibit when nothing is hung.

• Ray and Maria Stata Center

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  Completed 2004

  Frank Gehry

  A computer science building at MIT, on the site of the wartime radiation laboratory. Frank Gehry broke the programme into tilting brick and metal towers so no two research groups sit in identical space, which is what the department had asked for. Interior streets run through the base and stay open at night. The university later sued over leaks and cracking, and the building is still full.

• Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

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  Completed 1963

  Le Corbusier

  An arts building at Harvard, and the only one Le Corbusier completed in North America. A concrete ramp climbs from one street, passes through the middle of the building and descends to another, so the public route runs straight through the studios. Brise-soleil and free-form curved walls hold those studios on either side of it. He never visited the site, and the work was carried out by Josep Lluís Sert's office.

• Kresge Auditorium

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  Completed 1955

  Eero Saarinen

  An auditorium at MIT roofed by one eighth of a sphere. Eero Saarinen carried the thin concrete shell on three points only, which let the walls between them be entirely glass. The curve was drawn as a pure geometric section rather than shaped to the room beneath, and the acoustic problems that caused were solved afterwards with hanging clouds. It stands on the same lawn as his chapel, one shell beside one cylinder.