By sheer coincidence, Boston’s Blue Cross-Blue Shield Building (1960) was profiled recently on the same day in two quite different publications. In the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the thirteen-story office tower was described as a landmark of modern architecture, a decisive renunciation of the glass curtain-walled architecture of the 1950’s. The article, by Timothy Rowan of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, rested on a mountain of patient archival research. Too patient, alas: just as Rowan’s article appeared, the New York Times revealed that the building is slated to be torn down to make room for an 80-story skyscraper.
The BC-BS Building (as it is known locally) was designed by Paul Rudolph, an early opponent of America’s postwar architectural modernism. Rudolph scorned the spread of the all-glass curtain wall, which might be lovely in a single example—permitting a rich play of reflections—but which becomes maddening when it takes over an entire street, a spectacle of mirrors reflecting other mirrors. The problem of modern architecture, he quipped, was “too many goldfish bowls, too few caves.”
His BC-BS Building provided just such a cave. Instead of a glass sheath, Rudolph encased his building in a brawny exoskeleton of concrete piers. Besides carrying the building, they housed much of its ductwork and internal mechanics, opening the interior for flexible office space. His vigorous play of corrugated structure, expressed in weighty concrete, is characteristic of the New Brutalism, the architectural movement associated with his name. It was never a terribly popular movement, even among architects (it has long been alleged that his Art and Architecture Building at Yale was set ablaze in 1969 by the architecture students who used it). Preservationists are now fighting to save the BC-BS Building, but the prospects are dim for this ungainly monument.
There is a final irony. The BC-BS Building was an important forerunner of the ostentatiously “high-tech” architecture of the 1970’s, especially that writhing essay in color-coded conduits and pipes, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Centre was designed by Renzo Piano, who, in high Oedipal fashion, will now replace the BC-BS building with his own skyscraper. Shakespeare did not publish his folios on pulped copies of Holinshead’s Chronicles; Leonardo did not paint his Last Supper over a fresco of Giotto’s. Is architecture the only art form where the flattery of imitation can be accompanied by actual annihilation of the original?
