Wolf Architects, Inc.

Home
United States
Boston, MA
Wolf Architects, Inc.

Wolf Architects is committed to excellent design, historic preservation, & finding innovative soluti

12/20/2024

Finally designated a Landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission seventeen years after the petition that Gary wrote, and now awaiting formal approval by the Mayor and City Council, Boston City Hall is arguably the great building of twentieth century Boston! (That judgement was first proposed by the petition’s spokesperson, the late architectural historian Douglass Shand-Tucci.)

City Hall first made history because of the widely publicized design competition that generated it, won by a young team including two immigrants, Gerhart Kallmann and Michael McKinnell. The realized design contributed to the city’s rejuvenation, helped attract new talent and investment to Boston, and encouraged the soon-to-follow adaptive reuse of nearby Quincy Market. Its bold Brutalist design influenced aspirational architecture worldwide.

The building’s location on a site that was cleared by urban renewal demolition has made City Hall a lightning rod for criticism of the era’s anti-urban approach to planning. Nevertheless, the new building itself was contextual for its time. City Hall’s placement and design created views to 18th-century Faneuil Hall and Old North Church; its orientation acknowledged the 19th-century’s equivalently large-scale development of Quincy Market; and the building brought together the city’s red brick with concrete that relates in color and spirit to the bold granite architecture of Bulfinch, Bryant and Richardson.

The Study Report that made the case for landmarking City Hall could not have happened without the Getty-funded Conservation Management Plan for City Hall or Gary’s landmark petition, which the late, longtime BLC commissioner Pauline Chase-Harrell described in her 2007 letter of support as “very simply the best documented [petition] that I as a former chairman of the Commission have ever seen.” Gary’s continuing advocacy included organizing with Historic New England two major exhibitions of the architectural drawings for City Hall in 2008 and 2013.

Drawings by Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles are from the collections of Historic New England. Photo of Gary with Gerhard and Michael, 2008.

12/17/2024

A landmark day for transformative 20th-century structures!

Tuesday, December 10, 2024, saw the official designation of two perhaps-unlikely, now-historic landmarks in response to Gary’s and Wolf Architects’ nominations!

Each innovative and influential in different ways, these seemingly ad-hoc assemblages were in fact carefully designed, immensely consequential structures of the post-war era. Our next two posts will provide background on the new landmarks.

In Boston, seventeen years after Gary wrote the petition statement calling to landmark Boston City Hall, the Boston Landmarks Commission voted unanimously to designate the building as a City Landmark! The decision followed revisions to last year’s Study Report so that it recognizes City Hall’s interior public spaces as well as the Property Management Department’s caretaker role. The designation awaits Mayor Wu’s expected signature and City Council assent. The early design study at the left above, from the collections of Historic New England, was prepared for the 1961 open design competition won by architects Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles. (The late architectural historian Douglass Shand-Tucci was spokesperson for the 2007 landmark petition that Gary prepared.)

In Washington, D.C., on the same day, the National Park Service Advisory Board voted unanimously to designate 14 new National Historic Landmarks—“historic places of exceptional value”—one of which is a portable submersible drilling rig from 1954, “Mr. Charlie”. Wolf Architects nominated the vessel on behalf of the Morgan City, LA, Rig Museum. An example of oft-overlooked industrial structures, this mobile offshore drilling unit (MODU) was designated at the recommendation of the National Historic Landmarks Committee, based on our nomination. Secretary of the Interior Haaland approved the new status yesterday. The drawing above at the right, from the Museum’s archives, depicts a portion of the rig, showing its stacking of barge, caissons and columns, and deck, reflecting the engineering of John T. Hayward, Alden J. Laborde and Leslie Durant.

12/16/2024

A recent view of the 1940 Monks House in Lincoln, MA, by G. Holmes Perkins, a project on which we’ve consulted for a decade.
This house embodies the idea of movement in modern architecture.
The long driveway curves to approach the north elevation seen in this photo and then passes through the opening between the garage and the house.
The house itself engages the landscape with a pinwheel plan, seen in a previous post. One wing extends to the north (at the right); the garage is spun out to the east (at left); and the dining pavilion is at the south periphery of landscape architect Chrisopher Tunnard’s garden. A screen porch reached out to the west.
The array of living spaces along the south elevation celebrates the sun’s path over the course of the day. (the effect, of course, of our spinning planet).

10/21/2024

This should be an intriguing talk tonight that Gary organized for Docomomo/US New England!
The authors of the 2022 book, “Creating Coromandel,” will discuss the little-known Coromandel House in South Africa, designed by the Italian architect, Marco Zanuso and completed in 1975.

12/14/2022

We’re looking for a junior and a senior architect to join us for exciting residential and preservation work with homeowners and not-for-profits. Wolf Architects is a small, award-winning architectural practice based outside of Boston, with design interests and projects as seen in our posts. For photos of other projects and for firm information, visit our website, www.wolfarchitects.com.

Please apply by emailing [email protected] and attaching a cover letter, a resume, and several examples of your work, in PDF format not to exceed 5 MB.

This photo shows the shelves and cabinets that we designed in a new wing at a now-historic modern house by pioneering modern architect Henry B. Hoover in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The book and film “Breaking Ground” document Hoover’s residential work.

12/13/2022

A view inside our addition to the historic Mary Baker Eddy House in Lynn, Massachusetts, operated by the Longyear Museum. The new glass and steel entrance pavilion provides an accessible entry and a lift to both the basement and first floor of the 19th-century house museum. The contrasting but deferential form and materials attached to the Victorian residence create a “Combined Work” in the language of Paul Spencer Byard’s classic book, “The Architecture of Additions.”

Structural engineering by MacLeod Consulting. Photo by

10/30/2021

Another pre-WWII International Style house in Massachusetts, featured on the portion of the Docomomo_US “Mass Modernism” tour that Gary recently led.

Architect Edwin Goodell’s Whitney House, designed in 1939 for Harvard mathematics professor Hassler Whitney and his wife Margaret.

The photo and original blueprint of Goodell’s drawing show the extensive glazing—including corner windows—that he designed to open to the sun and landscape.

09/02/2021

Our third post on the Monks House.

A page from Architectural Forum’s publication of the Monks House in June, 1945. Ezra Stoller’s photo shows two of the key features of the design by G. Holmes Perkins with landscape by Christopher Tunnard:

The glazed south wall of the house with its steel structural columns and free-standing Hopes window system, with the second-floor balcony overhead for shading; and the landscape and garden outside, defined by a low diagonal stone wall and, beyond, by a wooden wall that extends out from the house to and through the covered dining pavilion.

This view can be seen as homage to the house that architect Serge Chermayeff had designed for his own family at Bentley Wood in England in 1937, also in collaboration with Tunnard. There the similar long wall terminated in a patio featuring a sculpture by Henry Moore, with an end partition open to views of the landscape beyond.

On October 1, the Monks House will be one of the sites visited along with the Gropius House as part of the “Mass Modernism” travel tour sponsored by Docomomo_US.

03/13/2021

Looking at another bedroom from the archives, as we enjoy awakening to greet the early sun of springtime and the arriving equinox!

From their bed, seen here backed by an undulating dyed-plaster wall that references the natural world, our clients look out to trees and sky and a roof deck that’s a great spot for morning coffee.

Photo by Eric Roth

03/05/2021

Bedroom in our Autumn Leaves House!

Photos by Eric Roth

02/26/2021

Here’s the place to greet the new day!
Our clients’ bedroom in our shosugiban and stucco residence overlooking conservation land.
Construction by King Builders of Somerville, Massachusetts. Photo by PMC Media Group for Pella.

02/18/2021

Judith Schalansky’s new book, An Inventory of Losses, encourages us to reconsider our losses—past and present—whether from the world of culture or nature. A number of her missing creations succumbed to fire, and that was the fate of Michael Graves’ amazing Snyderman House, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Designed in 1972, it burned thirty years later amidst controversy over its future.

Schalansky’s meditations and inventions in response to the now-missing might inspire reflections on the lost Snyderman House, extending to our need to experience architecture, and also to architecture’s elements, which Graves variously omitted, fragmented, highlighted, adapted or reassembled (and then rediscovered in his subsequent work).

Address

21 Willard Road
Boston, MA
02493

Telephone

+16177427557

Website

http://www.wolfarchitects.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Wolf Architects, Inc. posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Wolf Architects, Inc.:

Want your business to be the top-listed Home Improvement Business in Boston?