George Thrush’s faculty at the Northeastern University School of Architecture teach the discipline differently: It’s grounded in compromised urban settings. He also co-chairs the citizens committee reviewing the proposal to add 950,000 square feet of commercial development to the Christian Science Center – a development proposal that will likely result in the first city landmarks designation for a modernist-era construction project.
Thrush is a vocal critic of the budding movement to preserve wide swaths of Boston’s concrete modernist landscape. “Much of this architecture is the definition of Utopia, the hubris of a single moment in time,” he argued. “It presumes that all that came before it was inappropriate, but more importantly, that anything that comes after it is irrelevant as well. In the best of cities, there’s a certain general character that then allows incremental transformation over time. [Preservation] ought not to be considered as an absolutist thing. The truth is, what we need to do is understand what the actual trade-offs are. It’s hard to be an impassioned advocate for reasonableness, but that’s what I see my role as.”
George Thrush
Title: Director, Northeastern University School of Architecture, Boston
Age: 51
Experience: 26 years
How do you define your approach to architecture at Northeastern? What makes it different?
There’s a real interest in the role of buildings in the city. We’ve had a focus on urban issues, on post-industrial issues, from the very beginning. It’s not pie-in-the-sky. We try to focus on things where design really can have an impact. It’s almost a hybrid between architecture and urban design. And then on top of that, we really try to ramp up the pragmatism and seriousness about the everyday built environment, about market-driven building types, about the forces that actually shape the built environment.
In the old model, what you really see are a lot of deeply frustrated architects, young people who are trained for decisions they’re not in a place to make. Nobody says to a single recent architecture grad, “We don’t know what to do with the Christian Science Center Plaza, so what do you think we should do?” That’s not how it works.
In this economy, what’s the workplace been like for your students?
First of all, it’s a hideous market for architects. Having said that, [the school’s work-learn co-op program] is going shockingly, remarkably well. Our students are super-well-prepared because of the focus of the program. They’re capable of dealing with high-end design issues, and tackling any practical matter. They have experience, they’re inexpensive, and they’re really capable. They’re the ones that stay. That’s a cold-blooded assessment, but there it is.
Our recent grads are doing better than the average. I know there are whole classes out there who are unsure of what they’re going to do. It’s truer of folks who got trained in a particularly avant-garde type of way. There’s a kind of work that surely isn’t going to come right back, which is the frothy work on top of the boiling economy.
We’re in this interesting moment in time, where the preservation movement is starting to look at urban renewal-era developments. Should we really keep this stuff forever?
These buildings don’t feel like they’re part of the system, in the worst cases. One of the things that distinguishes the Christian Science Center is it’s the exception in this case. It really weaves the city together very well, in a way that’s not the case at Government Center. The Christian Science Center Plaza was really a blending of old and new. They didn’t bulldoze everything. They kept the tonal character. Look at that sensitivity, compared with Government Center. One was delicate, one was bombastic.
The problem with mid-century modern, especially the concrete architecture of Paul Rudolph, some of the I.M. Pei architecture, is that it’s giant, and it’s in really important parts of the city, and had it not been there, they would have absolutely evolved over time. These buildings are harder to adaptively reuse them because they are so specific in their form.
Because of how they were built, they’re stuck where they are?
The Christian Science Center buildings have been able to remain useful, despite having been done in this heroic era. The Colonnade Building builds on the precedent of a Le Corbusier building in India, but ultimately, it’s really a cellular office building. So even though it’s not as flexible as a contemporary cellular office building might be today, it does still fundamentally lend itself to clearing out one tenant, putting in infrastructure as needs change, and then putting in a new tenant. The same with the slim tower. Contrast that with Boston City Hall, or the Carpenter Center for that matter, or even the exception on the Christian Science Center site, the Sunday School building. You can’t modify them at all. You have to use that plan, or you have to get in there with a jackhammer and really mess things up.
And that’s not economically viable.
You would never do it if it were a pure development scheme. Now, it works if you get to build a 20-story leaseable tower above it. Height is the way to generate the revenue to do the things we, as sophisticated Boston residents, want done. That’s why when people say we want the good stuff at the ground level done, but we don’t want any height at all, other people put their heads in their hands and say ‘what are you people talking about?’
George Thrush’s Five Favorite Boston-Area Buildings
- Ames Gate Lodge, North Easton, by Henry Hobson Richardson
- Community Rowing Boathouse, Brighton, by Anmahian Winton Architects
- Boston Five Cents Savings Bank, Boston, by Kallman & McKinnell
- Honan-Allston Branch Library, Allston, by Machado and Silvetti Assoc.
- Kresge Chapel at MIT, Cambridge, by Eero Saarinen
