Copley Square - Architecture

Architecture

The Square is outstanding for the number and variety of important architectural works that have been built there, many of them official landmarks. Prominent structures still standing include:

  • Old South Church (1873), by Charles Amos Cummings and Willard T. Sears in the Venetian Gothic Revival style.
  • Trinity Church (1877, Romanesque Revival), considered H. H. Richardson's tour de force.
  • Boston Public Library (1895), by Charles Follen McKim in a revival of Italian Renaissance style, incorporates artworks by John Singer Sargent, Edwin Austin Abbey, Daniel Chester French, and others.
  • The Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel (1912) by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh in the Beaux-Arts style (on the site of the original Museum of Fine Arts).
  • The John Hancock Tower (1976, late Modernist) by Henry N. Cobb, at 790 feet (241 m) New England's tallest building.
  • The Bostix Kiosk (1992, Postmodernist), at the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston streets, by Graham Gund with inspiration from Parisian park pavilions.

Among buildings no longer standing are:

  • Chauncy Hall School (ca. 1874, demolished 1908), a tall-gabled High Victorian brick school building on Boylston St. near Dartmouth St.
  • Museum of Fine Arts (1876, demolished 1910) by John Hubbard Sturgis and Charles Brigham in the Gothic Revival style, was the first purpose-built public art museum in the world.
  • S.S. Pierce Building, (1887, demolished 1958) by S. Edwin Tobey, "no masterpiece of architecture, great urban design. A heap of dark Romanesque masonry..."

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