ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS "Huntington Avenue has long been a center of culture. The city calls it the Avenue of the Arts. But it`s been home to different kinds of culture at different times. We`re looking at the Museum of Fine Arts in the new photograph. Even before the museum arrived in Boston, this was a site for exhibitions. Pop culture existed in those days, too, and the land was used for rodeos and circuses. We can see the tents of one traveling circus in the older photo, where a sign (not visible) announces &ldquo;This Way to the Big Show&rdquo; &mdash; words that could well adorn a banner at the MFA today. Not much is known about those circuses. As for the museum, its building came along in 1909. That was an era when architects in both Europe and America loved to make big, pretentious public spaces. The architect was Guy Lowell, who was a cousin of Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, the kind of family connection so helpful to aspiring young architects. For his cousin`s university, Guy Lowell also designed Lowell Hall, Emerson Hall, the Fox Club, Briggs Cage (an athletic facility), and the president's mansion (now Loeb House). Young American architects in those days flocked to Paris to drink wine and study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. They believed they had to go to Europe if they wanted to get any culture. (One of Guy Lowell's gifted contemporaries, Frank Lloyd Wright, was offered a free education at the school and turned it down, choosing to develop his own kind of architecture instead.) Lowell`s design for the museum is filled with motifs from classical Greek and Roman temple architecture, such as the central entry portico with its four huge Ionic columns. Everything is arranged symmetrically, in a style that`s usually called simply Beaux-Arts. The museum is meant to look like a palace, and it does. Faced with Deer Isle granite from Maine, it`s imposing, but it`s dull. Probably it is best remembered for the sentimental statue of a Native American on horseback, Appeal to the Great Spirit, added by sculptor Cyrus E. Dallin in 1913. Buildings are always changing. Lowell himself added wings to the MFA. So did other architects, including I. M. Pei. Since 1999, Britain`s Sir Norman Foster, a winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, has been working on a proposal to further enlarge the vast museum. The museum wants to add gallery space and cover the open-air courtyards with glass roofs to make them usable year-round. At last count, phase one of Foster`s scheme was estimated to cost $180 million. A construction start is hoped for 2005." -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - The Art and Soul of the City," Boston Globe, 15 August 2004

Hand colored photograph, ca. 1925. Leon Abdalian

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Ann Beha from Ann Beha Architects talks about the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

 Hearst Tower revives a dream from the 1920s, when William Randolph Hearst envisioned Columbus Circle as a vibrant media and entertainment quarter. Hearst commissioned a skyscraper on 8th Ave., but construction ended because of the Depression. The current Hearst Tower's distinctive faceted silhouette rises dramatically above the already-completed 1928 base of Joseph Urban's planned building, with a vast internal plaza occupying the entire shell of the historic base. Designed to consume significantly less energy than a conventional office building, the new 42-story tower provides almost one million square feet of office space. It rises above the old building, linked on the outside by a transparent skirt of glazing that floods the spaces below with natural light. 

Hearst Tower

Brandon Haw, from Foster and Partners, discusses the construction of the Hearst Tower.

 The School of Management was founded in the late 1970s and originally occupied a small campus composed of four existing buildings and an addition. Since then they have experienced a strong growth in faculty and students, and currently occupy several buildings at the north end of the Yale campus. The new campus will consolidate the school's many facilities into a single 230,000 sf campus near the site of the original complex. The facility's main components&mdash;classrooms, offices, common spaces and auditorium&mdash;will be grouped around a central court, in the tradition of Yale campus architecture, large enough to accommodate graduation ceremonies and other major events. The ground floor will be devoted to common facilities, the auditorium and publicly oriented components of the office block. Two double-height floors will accommodate tiered and flat-floored classrooms, which will lend themselves to horseshoe and other layouts, reflecting the varying teaching methods of the SOM curriculum. In design for LEED Gold. 

Yale University School of Management

With the passage of the Midtown East Zoning Plan, JP Morgan Chase was able to scoop up 680,000 sf of air rights from St Barts and Grand Central Terminal enabling it to build the tallest, greenest tower in New York to house 14,000 employees. &nbsp;Chase established a plethora of amenities with biometric scanners to enter the building’, and&nbsp;whip out our phones to activate coffee machines with a QR code. &nbsp;There are 19 restaurant food hall. &nbsp;Emergency bathroom locks will instantaneously alert building security should anyone be acousted.&nbsp; At Chase, lighting mimics our circadian rhythms.&nbsp; Temperatures inside the rooms at Chase are smartly&nbsp;monitored, and fresh air is cleaned.&nbsp;&nbsp; The building is all-electric and is carbon net neutral.&nbsp;Most of the gymnastics to even erect the JP Morgan tower take place underground, as the structure is threaded between the tracks leading to Grand Central Terminal. It turns out that there were at most 13 possible foundation points.&nbsp; Even to use them required robust technical developments by the engineering team: concrete was made very dense and very strong. &nbsp;Which is partially why the open space of the ground floor structural system is so ‘welcoming’.&nbsp; The space above it hides the massive bracing trusses.&nbsp; Those of us who are engineering buffs and night owls who didn't have weekend dates had the opportunity to witness the journey they&nbsp;took as they were carefully maneuvered from New Jersey to Park Avenue. &nbsp;

A rendering with the tower at 270 Park Avenue in the foreground.

will have room for 14,000 employees.

which had to be approved by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which says having such a big employer near a transit hub is ideal for New York City.

JP Morgan Chase Building

270 Park Avenue, designed by Foster + Partners and completed in 2025 for JPMorgan Chase, is a modern supertall tower defined by its diagrid structural exoskeleton, tapered form, and high‑performance façade. The building replaces the original SOM tower.

270 Park Avenue

British architect Norman Foster of Foster and Partners was hired to design the new 2 World Trade Center, on the northeastern part of the World Trade Center site at 200 Greenwich Street, in May 2006.&nbsp;

The foundation work was completed in 2013, though no construction has taken place since. The rest of the building, however, has yet to be built unless tenants for Tower 2 could be found.&nbsp;

On June 9, 2015, Wired magazine reported that Two World Trade Center would be redesigned by Bjarke Ingels of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and be built by 2021. The bottom half of the new design would have been leased out to 21st Century Fox and News Corp until they decided against leaving their current headquarters.&nbsp;

After the pulling out of News Corp and 21st Century Fox, the future of the site became uncertain, with calls for the tower's design to be reverted to its original incarnation. Renderings of a redesigned Foster and Partners design were published in early 2022.

2 World Trade Center

 Located in the heart of Las Vegas Boulevard, Crystals is the 500,000-square-foot retail and entertainment space, which is the connective center of the MGM MIRAGE City Center project. It is a vertical city within a city that includes 2,400 private residences, two boutique hotels, and a 61-story resort casino. The crystalline &amp; metal-clad fa&ccedil;ade signal to visitors well in advance of arrival that Crystals is not a traditional retail environment. An entryway into the retail area from the Strip will draw pedestrians into the public arcade, covered by a spiraling roof structure. From the interior, the roof`s dramatic angles and skylights become a backdrop for the luxury retail and dining it houses which include Louis Vuitton, TIFFANY &amp; CO., and Bulgari as well as concept restaurants from Wolfgang Puck and Todd English. The public spaces allow for a variety of urban experiences: a water feature at the entry, cafes and a grand staircase leading to Casino Square at the end of the arcade, animating the entire space. The design and construction of Crystals employed the most environmentally conscious practices and materials. In November 2009 it was announced that Crystals achieved LEED&reg; Gold Core &amp; Shell certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), making it the world`s largest retail district to receive this level of recognition. 

Crystals at City Center

Foster + Partners is a global studio with offices across the world. Founded by Norman Foster in 1967, the work focuses on sustainable architecture, urbanism, engineering and design.

Foster + Partners

Michael McGough, from Buro Happold talks about the engineering concepts of the Sperone Westwater Gallery.  

Peter Han discusses the Sperone Westwater building.

Foster + Partners

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