Yet another Big Dig Greenway addition is in the running, competing for parcel of land and for charitable funds.
Yesterday was the deadline for submitting proposals for this segment of the Greenway. Three qualified proposals were submitted, including those for the New Center [for Arts and Culture] and the Boston Museum Project. The third proposal is from Manjushri Prakash, an architect and urban designer from Cambridge. Her $55 million vision is for a multilevel plaza that would include indoor theaters, an outdoor theater, restaurants, and a parking area for tour buses. It would be a place were people of all ages and all parts of the city could meet and interact, she said.
Forget philanthropy fatigue (”To date, the New Center has raised about $2 million, Sidman said, noting that the sponsors have a proven track record for raising money”): what we have here is a breakdown in any conception of the needs and function of a city. The proposal from Prakash may be smart in the details, but the does she really think people will just spontaneously meet and interact in the Financial District? Building it will not necessarily make the people come.
As for the other two - essentially the choice is between an expensive culture/art museum and an even more expensive history museum - I’m still not sure of the reason for a new building. Boston, after all, has many buildings. A lovely Beaux-Arts building across my office has gone vacant for the last couple of years yet is right on the Freedom Trail. And cultural institutions can thrive just as well (sometimes better) in abondoned warehouses as in shiny glass and steel buildings. There may be practical reasons that Parcel 18 needs to be built up right away, but in the rush I can’t help but feel the wrong emphasis is being made. Prestige and architectural rendering are supplanting a sociological understanding of how cities work.
I don’t mean to cast aspersion on the exciting opportunity that the Big Dig Greenway parcels provide. But in every design office and in every planning meeting should hang a photo of Government Center as a cautionary emblem. Not merely as an outdated architectural style or even as hubris in urban ‘renewal’, but for the specific point that successful urban spaces rely on the ulterior uses people have for a city. And streets and foot traffic. Government center is one of the biggest failures in our urban design - some of the most valuable real estate providing little use or little joy. A new T station is cosmetic band-aid on the real problem, which is a stretch of road (Cambridge St.) that goes too long intersected. The best thing they could do is to repave half the roads that once comprised Scollay Square. (You wouldn’t even have to allow traffic on all of them). Allow private development on half of the parcels, limiting most to four stories or so. Plant the remainder with grass. Magically, the yellowed concrete will seem like OK architecture and people will populate the space once more.
Tourists are important part of the mix, of course, but even they don’t want to trek to a deserted museum in the windswept Financial District. Meanwhile, while we imagine cultural centers left and right, existing cultural institutions are looking for money and other urban needs go unmet. What’s happened to that Trust for City Hall Plaza anyway? Closed for lack of funding and interest I gather.
No comments have been added to this post yet.