commentMy Boston: Gary Johnson
Gary Johnson, a principal at Cambridge Seven Associates, takes us on a tour of the Liberty Hotel, built on the site of, and incorporating elements from, the Charles Street Jail, designed in 1851 by Gridley James Fox Bryant. The hotel evokes its jail-house past, Johnson says, in a provocative, but tasteful way—and not too much like a "Disney recreation." Johnson, who led the Cambridge Seven Associates' architecture team on the project, said one of the primary design ideas was to contrast the historic with something very "contemporary, clean, and new."
The second structure Johnson points out is Pei/Cobb's John Hancock Tower. A "magic" building, he says. Johnson, who calls the Hancock "the best building in Boston," loves how it "changes from wherever you are in the city," going from a slender to a broad tower.
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 Liberty Hotel [4:15] Video produced by Bryant Rousseau |
| Rockefeller Center [0:49 seconds] Video produced by Bryant Rousseau |
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