Financial District (walk 4)

The fourth walk evidenced rolling spaces and their culminations on the horizon as they rose and fell. Spaces like Boston Common via Park St. station and the Granary Burial Ground conversely recede into contexts that are anything but flat. As we prefaced our later drawings of City Hall with these gestures, it gave way to the same kind of bevelled forms now appearing in building designs.

Facades pushed outward giving their features a malleability that kept datum with the urban wall while also lending itself to flexible uses at street level. Looking around from Government Center began to reveal commonalities in soft edges, round forms, bulging facades, and curvilinear perimetric profiles that opened themselves to the swath of open space in between. While this open space is literally cobbled by bricks and loses the wavelike feel of the Common and the Granary, the buildings all work to summon these nuances with specific language.

Riverway (walk 3)

Snaking its way through the Fenway neighborhood and into Jamaica Plain is the Riverway, established in 1890 by F.L. Olmsted and part of Boston's Emerald Necklace park system. Olmsted created the area as a low drainage point to resolve groundwater in nineteenth century Boston.

As the road rises toward J.P., the Riverway's tapered entrance near the Landmark Center begins to drop and recede into a forested pedestrian path. The substrata of the park not only serves a civil purpose as Olmsted had intended but simultaneously isolates the walkers experience and severs the urban connection. Soon you are surrounded by a myriad of trees while the city exists somewhere above you. The canopy along the path reiterates feelings of intimacy as explosive views to city buildings that would otherwise reveal urban context become blurred.

The berm establishes an earthen wall to act as an outdoor room, as it comes to a point around the nexus of the Fenway it seems to point toward the Landmark Center and acts like a conduit that reintroduces patrons to the existence of the city.

Back Bay (walk 2)

Boston's Back Bay is a manufactured installation set in place by the marking of the old Mill Dam. Land taken from Beacon Hill and Needham was used to fill the Charles River and develop the neighborhoods we currently experience between Beacon and Boylston Streets. These streets run east/ west and are parallel to Commonwealth and Marlborough, which also mark the neighborhood.

A series of north/ south streets is alphabetized to provide navigation-friendly datum; Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, and Hereford. As you move west, you traverse the alphabet.

We paid close attention to a corner condition at the intersection of Berkeley and Commonwealth, building elements seemed designed to frame the experience to the city:

The facade of the residence on the east side of Commonwealth noticeable broke with the language of the urban wall it was a part of by stepping down a full story. A corner turret delineated a perceived language that a rotational transition was imminent and forthcoming, and just as you reach the edge of the house you realize the entrance flanks the west end and is set back which pulls your gaze through the corner and into city fabric.

On the other side of the street an apartment building acts as a sort of rudder, which adds indelibly an emboldened desire to direct all attention through this very specific corner. It is proportioned so that horizontal reveals all point toward context on the horizon, taller and longer than its width, it exerts pictorial gravity.

Later on we drew neighborhood churches, each from a different period. Two in particular were examined; First Lutheran on Berkeley St and First Church of Boston on the corner of Marlborough and Berkeley. Both churches had designed elements that directly effected subjects by demarcating outdoor spaces with an air of sanctity; First Lutheran with its courtyard and First Church with some sort of urban den which sinks a few feet below grade before rising to the church entrance:

Our final stop was Copley where we drew Trinity Church. Proportions were so well considered that seams between building materials always brought the eye to some geometric whole. It was pleasant to be within the portico among carefully considered columns while looking out onto the square where the trees felt like they were a correlation to the slender vertical elements at hand.