Adding to the Heritage

A city's electorate rarely thinks of its mayor as a grand patron of architecture. But by the massive weight of budget appropriations for new construction, he is. And never is the mayor's lot more difficult, and challenging, than when he has to add to, and alter, one of the city's prized possessions. Last week two mayors faced such a task. Each took a different route to a solution, and both felt that they had not only preserved but even added to the city's heritage.

Bastion for Books. In Boston, the problem was the city's 72-year-old Public Library, a stately Italian Renaissance-style palazzo designed by Charles McKim, senior partner of McKim, Mead & White, which presides augustly over Copley Square. So highly is the design regarded in the architectural profession that the American Institute of Architects voted it one of the best 50 buildings of the past 100 years. But the Public Library is today woefully overcrowded. To design a $22 million addition with room for 1,000 more readers and 3,000,000 more volumes, Mayor John Collins and the library's trustees picked Manhattan's Harvard-trained Philip Johnson, 60, from among half a dozen architects because he agreed not to take the old building out of its "original perspective."

"The problem," says Johnson, "was to match the old building with something that neither dominated it nor was just a tail to it; something that wasn't a copy and yet followed the function." He took three years to brood before the public got its first look at his model. It turned out to be neither modern nor Renaissance but massively medieval, a bastion for books that seemed to echo H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church across Copley Square. But Johnson had bound his new addition with the old through a variety of formal devices: a common cornice line, an identically pitched roof, equally deepset windows. Johnson even plans to reopen a quarry in Milford, Mass, to obtain the same pink granite used in the existing library, which will be sandblasted back to its original hue.

Sloping Earth Mound. In Manhattan, the problem was where to relocate the police stables, riding school and the indoor polo field once used by the elite socialites of National Guard Squadron A, since their former quarters in the 94th Street Armory were torn down to make way for a new junior high school. The obvious answer was Central Park, but New Yorkers have come to regard the park as sacrosanct, have fiercely resisted any infringement, including even the philanthropic offer of Huntington Hartford to build a terraced cafe in one corner. The solution, as proposed by the competition-winning architectural firm of Kelly & Gruzen: bury the facilities underground. Key elements in the $5,700,000 scheme, which will leave 95% of the ten-acre site still land scaped: below-ground-level stables for 370 horses topped by a three-acre orchard of flowering crab apple trees, and a sloping earth mound 400 ft. wide and 30 ft. high with an indoor riding ring beneath and an outdoor ring on top.

Tanks at Any Minute. Both Boston's Mayor Collins and New York's John Lindsay pronounced themselves well-satisfied clients. Lindsay called the Central Park design "inconspicuous and understated," a true triumph for the architecture of repression. But both mayors still have to cope with public reaction.

"It looks like a fortress," said the woman who runs the information desk at the Boston library. "I expect tanks to come out of it at any minute." As for the Central Park stables, Richard Harrison, chairman of the ad hoc Save Central Park Committee, called the plan "a disaster." Said he: "Indoor sports facilities don't belong in a park intended for outdoor activities." And at least one disgruntled member of the jury argued that the award was given for "negative" reasons--that is, that the prize went to the design that came closest to being invisible.

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