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..."
Read more about this topic: Copley Square
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)