PRP4 Boston 2025

Preserving the Recent Past 4 


March 19-23, 2025
Boston, Massachusetts

In 1995, Preserving the Recent Past – the first national conference to examine the evaluation and preservation of twentieth-century resources – was held in Chicago, Illinois. It was during this event that a US chapter of Docomomo International held its charter meeting. In honor of our 30th anniversary, Docomomo US is partnering with the Historic Preservation Education Foundation (HPEF) to host Preserving the Recent Past 4 (PRP4) in 2025. This event will be in lieu of the National Symposium. 

PRP4 offers a national forum to share the latest strategies for identifying, protecting, and conserving significant structures and sites from the recent past.

Docomomo US and its local New England chapter will take part in the paper selection process and will take the lead in organizing the unique tours we are known for. And we wouldn't miss a chance to throw a party!

All major conference information and registration will be posted on the PRP4 website.

Plus, don't miss two special Docomomo US events happening alongside the conference. On Tuesday March 18 (the day before PRP begins), we will get a special tour of the Philips Exeter campus, now closed to the public, including Louis Kahn's iconic library. Then on Thursday evening, March 20, join us for a reception and tour of two striking Modernist churches, Paul Rudolph's First Church of Boston, and its neighbor across the street, the First Lutheran Church, designed by Pietro Belluschi.

Thank you to everyone who joined us in Boston for Preserving the Recent Past 4, and especially to our conference partners, the Historic Preservation Education Foundation and Boston Architectural College, as well as the Docomomo US/New England chapter, and the sponsors and partners listed below who helped to make the event such a success.

 

 

Featured Sites

Gropius House

Walter Gropius, founder of the German design school known as the Bauhaus, was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. He designed Gropius House as his family home when he came to teach architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Modest in scale, the house was revolutionary in impact. It combined traditional elements of New England architecture—wood, brick, and fieldstone—with innovative materials including glass block, acoustical plaster, chrome banisters, and the latest technology in fixtures. It features a significant collection of furniture designed by Marcel Breuer and fabricated in Bauhaus workshops. With the family’s possessions still in place, Gropius House has a sense of immediacy and intimacy. In true Bauhaus style, the house and its landscape exemplify maximum efficiency and simplicity. (Adapted from the website of Historic New England)

Featured Sites

Boston City Hall

Boston City Hall has been heralded as a landmark of 1960s Brutalism. Constructed of primarily of brick and precast concrete with massing that evokes an inverted pyramid, and based upon both modern and classical ideologies, its design was meant to stand apart from the surrounding architecture while invoking a sense of accessibility and openness. The surrounding plaza originally contained a fountain but after chronic mechanical problems it was covered with a concrete slab, creating a venue for public gatherings and events. It stands as one of the most important concrete buildings constructed in Boston in the mid-twentieth century, representing a complete departure from the prevalent architectural expression of the city and marks the beginning of a “new” Boston, a city of progress.

Featured Sites

Kresge Auditorium and Chapel

The MIT Chapel was designed by famed architect Eero Saarinen and dedicated in May 1955 alongside Saarinen’s Kresge Auditorium. The cylindrical building’s unique and graceful design was intended to meet the needs of all faiths and continues to serve as a place for worship for a diverse MIT community. The building’s unique appearance was new to a campus that had previously employed a more classical architecture style. After some criticism, Saarinen explained that the chapel’s windowless cylinder “implied the self-contained, inward-feeling which was desirable” for a place of worship. He noted that its undulating interior walls promoted good acoustics as well as an “enclosed feeling.” A stained glass entryway leads to the chapel, the centerpiece of which is a solid marble altar placed in the center of a circular marble platform. A metal sculpture by Harry Bertoia reflects light from the only window in the chapel, a beautiful domed skylight. The Chapel also features a 1300-pound bell cast at MIT in the Metals Processing Laboratory and a 768-pipe organ designed by Walter Holtkamp. (Adapted from the website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Featured Sites

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, completed in 1963, is the only building on the North American continent designed by the famous Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. Despite the controversy over the wisdom of placing a building of such modern design in a traditional location, Le Corbusier felt that a building devoted to the visual arts must be an experience of freedom and unbound creativity. A traditional building for the visual arts would have been a contradiction. The Carpenter Center represents Corbusier’s attempt to create a “synthesis of the arts,” the union of architecture with painting, sculpture, through his innovative design. The building was completed in 1963, made possible by a gift from Alfred St. Vrain Carpenter, and the intent to house the artistic entities of Harvard College under one roof came to fruition in 1968 as the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. The five levels of the building function as open and flexible working spaces for painting, drawing, and sculpture, and the ramp through the heart of the building encourages public circulation and provides views into the studios, making the creative process visible through the building design. The Sert Gallery, at the top of the ramp, features the work of contemporary artists, and the main gallery at street level hosts a variety of exhibitions supporting the curriculum of the Department. The Carpenter Center is also home to the Harvard Film Archive. (Adapted from the website of Harvard University' Carpenter Center for Visial Arts)

Featured Sites

Boston Government Center

Large scale redevelopment in Boston created opportunities for cultural and civic organizations to reinvent and re-establish themselves in the mid twentieth century. The centrally located Scollay Square, a rabbit’s warren of streets and older buildings, gave way to the epic forms of the Boston Government Center. Designed by master architect Paul Rudolph, the building was constructed a block away from the Brutalist City Hall, and is marked by a symphony of swirling walls and stairways in rough hewn concrete, metal, and glass. Monumental buildings such as the Government Center and City Hall, along with their surrounding plazas, marked the newly configured administrative hub of the city government, designed to manifest public confidence in the future of Boston. (Adapted from Boston Modern: The Spirit of Reinvention, published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation)

Featured Sites

Blue Cross/Blue Shield Building

The Blue Cross/Blue Shield Building is a 12-story, square plan office building designed by Paul Rudolph. It features an innovative exo-structure which frees the interiors of columns and also contains the heating and ventilation systems. Rather than sheathing the building with glass, Rudolph faced the building in masonry to better contextualize with its neighbors. Plans for a development threatening demolition of the building originally surfaced in 2007, when the City of Boston announced the construction of a tower designed by Renzo Piano on an adjacent city- owned lot at 115 Winthrop Square. The plans called for the creation of a new open space to complement the tower on the site of Blue Cross/Blue shield, which the City also owned at the time. Funding for the project got caught in the financial recession of 2008 and it never materialized. More recently, the Boston Redevelopment Authority put out a request for proposals in another attempt to develop 115 Winthrop Square. The RFP drew five responses. One of them, from Trans National Properties, proposes the demolition of Blue Cross/Blue Shield in the second phase of a twin-tower construction project-- perhaps because, as the current owner of Blue Cross/Blue Shield, it was the only responder in a position to do so. The building’s fate remains threatened as of March 2017. (Adapted from the World Monuments Fund website)

Featured Sites

Boston University School of Law

Josep Lluis Sert’s design for the campus of the Boston University School of Law is one of the great modern complexes of the mid-twentieth century and the architect’s largest assemblage of structures in the world.

 

One of Sert’s seminal urban achievements, this group of five buildings dramatically altered traditional campus planning in America. The refinement of its concept and the imposing visual imprint it creates along the Charles River contribute to its historic legacy.

 

The centerpiece of the Law School, its 1962 Law Tower, stands as a noble example of the Heroic/Brutalist period. Widely regarded as the best of Sert’s tall buildings, it is recognized by some critics as the most innovative high-rise building of its period in New England. Yet, less than a decade ago, its future was far from certain.

Featured Sites

First Church Boston

In 1967, a fire destroyed most of the original 1867 gothic revival church by William Ware and Henry Van Brunt. The congregation considered proposals from Marcel Breuer, Joseph Schiffer, Joseph Eldridge, and Paul Rudolph. They voted in favor of Rudolph’s design, which incorporated “the remains of the local ‘puddingstone’ tower, steeple and facade of the original 1868 building to serve as the East walls of the new building. The charred wood frame of the original rose window opening is left to serve as a reminder of the 1968 fire.” (Paul Ruolph Institute for Modern Architecture) Rudolph’s work “successfully married the remaining elements of the original building with his lower vertically ribbed ‘corduroy’ concrete structure and added a small external amphitheater and a preschool to the sanctuary.” (SAH Archipedia)

About

The Docomomo US National Symposium is the primary event in the United States for professionals to discuss and share efforts to preserve modern architecture and meet leading practitioners and industry professionals.
 

The Symposium developed as a result of the Docomomo US Board of Directors’ annual “Face to Face” meeting. The first expanded event took place in Los Angeles in 2010 with an open forum for local individuals actively engaged in the discussion of modern architecture. Docomomo US hosted its first National Symposium in Sarasota, Florida in April 2013. Held annually, this multi-day conference seeks to engage local participants in cities across the United States, offering participants the ability to interact with and explore a wide variety of significant modern architecture and sites.