Robert Campbell, Architecture Critic in Love With Boston, Dies at 88

New York Times

7 days ago

Robert Campbell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic of The Boston Globe who for more than 40 years wrote with clarity, wit and, yes, love about a city in transition, died on April 29 at an assisted living facility in Cambridge, Mass. He was 88.
The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his son, Nick Campbell, said.
Mr. Campbell began writing for The Globe in 1973, a heady time in Boston. The era of slum clearance, or so-called urban renewal, was ending, and suddenly there was an interest in preservation. While the scars of that urban renewal — both social and physical — remained, the city was starting to turn itself around.
Mr. Campbell's mission 'was to make sure that Boston recovered properly,' Alex Krieger, a professor emeritus of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, said in an interview. 'Not that he would put it that way.'
Mr. Krieger continued: 'He loved cities more than he loved architecture, and that made him an important figure in describing architecture in terms of its impact, positive and negative, upon the city. He didn't mince words. He was a kind of gentle scold.'
Of the 'ungainly and airless' Leverett Saltonstall State Building, in the government district, he wrote, 'The Saltonstall Building is to architecture what H.R. Haldeman is to statesmanship.' (It was June 1973, and the Watergate hearings were in full swing.)
Of the vast and grim City Hall Plaza, which he likened to an empty parking lot or the site of a Nazi rally, he wrote: 'It's always too big, too empty, too grand. There are too many things it doesn't have enough of' — by which he meant 'enormous sidewalk cafes with parasols over the tables' and 'shouting street vendors selling eggplants and knishes' and 'people making speeches about how the Communists are stealing our bodily fluids.'
He concluded: 'In other words, life.'
Yet he approved of the Brutalist monument — or horror, to many Bostonians — that was City Hall.
'Even if you're in the majority who think City Hall in its present form is ugly, here's a thought: Ugly people can be great. So can ugly buildings,' he wrote in 2008. 'City Hall is powerful and memorable, with the rugged majesty of a fortress, or, closer to home, with the muscular grandeur of the famous generation of 'Boston Granite Style' commercial buildings of the late 19th century.'
Although Mr. Campbell was a practicing architect, he wrote not for those in the ivory tower but for the citizens of Boston. He was instructive without being pedagogic or preachy. He was never pretentious, nor was he folksy. He abhorred jargon — a staple of architecture-speak — and bureaucratic myopia. He believed in preservation, but he was no reactionary or regressive. In person, he was flinty and astringent and a little shy.
'He was not pining for the golden age of Classical architecture,' Mr. Krieger said. 'He was just as critical of people who were trying to mimic history as he was of the modernists who seemed ignorant of the longstanding attributes of urban places.'
'Reviewing a building is a little disconcerting,' Mr. Campbell declared in one of his earliest columns. 'It doesn't make sense to treat a building as you would a book or a movie. No one needs a review to tell him whether to see or buy a building. Worse yet, no one can define where a building begins or ends. It doesn't have a frame around it.'
It was how a building fit into its surroundings — how it elevated or disrupted or ignored them — that mattered to him.
'Architecture is the art of making places, not primarily an art of making things,' he wrote. 'It's the art of using buildings and landscape to shape space. A place can be your bedroom or your street or your neighborhood, a garden or a park or a city. It can be any space that human beings have created for habitation. The best city is the one with the most livable places.'
As he wrote in 1985, 'Good urban design is based on the essential truth that cities are made of streets, not of isolated buildings surrounded by empty air.'
Take skyscrapers, which he divided into two categories, the Diva and the Dagwood, in a 2015 column.
'The Diva, self-centered, ignores everything that's around it,' he wrote, citing as an example the hulking 1960s-era Prudential Building in the Back Bay neighborhood. 'It stands, or rather poses, like an opera star on an empty stage. A Diva is usually set back from the street, behind empty space in the form of a lawn or a plaza.'
He continued: 'Developers often praise such space as a gift to pedestrians, but that's hogwash. A plaza isn't there for the people, it's there to show off the Diva, or at best fulfill some bureaucrat's square-foot calculations of required open space. No matter how elegantly they might be paved or planted, urban plazas are boring, windy and little used.'
A Dagwood, unlike a Diva, bellies up to its neighbors, resembling, in Mr. Campbell's view, three buildings stacked atop one another, which reminded him of the 'absurdly tall' sandwiches favored by Dagwood Bumstead, from the long-running comic strip 'Blondie.' The bottom bit, Mr. Cambell wrote, is 'the part of the tower that lives in the human world, shaping the street space and nurturing pedestrian vitality.'
Mr. Campbell was instinctively pro-Dagwood, but he did love the John Hancock Tower, the shimmering edifice designed by Henry Cobb, who worked with I.M. Pei. A dazzling Diva, he called it, although he added the caveat that 'a city of Hancocks would be monotonous and inhuman.'
It was for his writing about the Hancock, among other columns, that he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1996. The tower had been beset by all sorts of mishaps, notoriously the failure of its windows, which began blowing off while it was still under construction in 1973.
The Plywood Palace, people called it. Mr. Campbell called it a 'haunted high-rise mirror, which always seems to be reflecting clouds as if it were brooding on its own grim beginnings.'
Myths about why the windows were flying off abounded, and he set out to debunk them, hilariously and methodically. In the process, he learned not only why the windows had failed — it had something to do with the solder used to hold the frames together — but also that everyone involved had agreed to keep the reason a secret.
Between 1982 and 2005, Mr. Campbell and the photographer Peter Vanderwarker collaborated on a column called Cityscapes, for which Mr. Vanderwarker would choose an archival photo of a Boston neighborhood and then photograph the place in its present state. He would send the paired images to Mr. Campbell, who would write a short essay to accompany them. Mr. Campbell never knew what Mr. Vanderwarker might send, and Mr. Vanderwarker never knew what Mr. Campbell was going to write until he saw it in the paper. They collected their columns in a book, 'Cityscapes of Boston: An American City Through Time,' published in 1992.
'He shaped the way a whole generation of architects looked at the city,' Mr. Vanderwarker said. 'He was very much out of the Jane Jacobs mold. He loved streets. He didn't see buildings so much as objects, but as set pieces. He once described them as seniors in a class photo, all jostling each other.'
Robert Douglas Campbell Jr. was born on March 31, 1937, in Buffalo. His mother, Amy (Armitage) Campbell, was a feature writer for a local newspaper before her marriage; his father was an accountant.
Robert was an English major at Harvard and wrote his honors thesis on the poetry of Dylan Thomas. He went on to study journalism at Columbia University and then worked as a staff writer for Parade magazine. But what he really wanted to do was practice architecture, so he returned to Cambridge, where he attended Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He graduated in 1967.
For the next six years, he worked for Sert, Jackson & Associates; he then went out on his own, working mostly as a consultant for civic projects and cultural institutions, including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. He was a founder of the Mayors' Institute on City Design, a partnership between the United States Conference of Mayors and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In addition to his son, Mr. Campbell is survived by a brother, Charles, and a sister, Anne Birkett. His marriage to Janice (Gold) Campbell, a lawyer, ended in divorce.
'I've always thought that a good model for any critic is Alice, the heroine of 'Alice in Wonderland,'' Mr. Campbell wrote in 2004 in the magazine Architectural Record. 'Alice is constantly running into creatures who are crazy — the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit — but they're crazy in a special way. They're obsessed by ideas, and they ignore real-world experience.'
He added, 'Alice isn't fooled or overly impressed by her crazies, and neither should any critic be.'