Projective preservation : reframing Rudolph's Tower for Boston

Abstract

By 2012, the fate of Paul Rudolph's tower in downtown Boston has been in question for years while a vision of a denser city calls for its demolition. Projected development on the site currently argues that to move forward, the existing building must be erased entirely. While progressive at the time of its construction, the outscaled tower is now perceived as obsolete and thus disposable. This brutalist work is representative of a class of buildings in crisis; architects and preservationists must decide quickly how to handle the sometimes fraught histories of the still massive urban infrastructures that are widely being excised from the urban landscape. This thesis questions how to balance the desire for some physical persistance of brutalist architectural ideals with the progressive spirit that marks the architectures of both past and present. The project proposes an aggressive, partial preservation of the Rudolph building that uses the original architecture as a basis for iteration. Investigation of the embedded tensions in preservation practice between the preserved and the intervention reveals space for preservation operations that translate architectures, holding more potential for projection than tactics of simple monumentalization or juxtaposition.