The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity
Boston
Ann Beha Architects

A modern library within a neoclassical building respects the old by making clear what’s new

© Brian Vanden Brink

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By Nancy Levinson

As conceived by the client, the program for the Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity mixes the practical and idealistic, the private and public. Located within an existing building—the 11-story Neoclassical mid-rise once occupied by the Christian Science Publishing Society—the 81,000-square-foot facility includes a technologically up-to-date research library and a small conference center for both institutional and public use. In addition to these specialized spaces, the library features a sequence of public galleries, all of which have a marked spiritual and pedagogical bent, and whose presence addresses the client’s ambitious goal of making the library a forum for the public. These galleries include the Hall of Ideas, located in the double-height space that was once the building’s entrance lobby and for which the MIT Media Lab has created "Word Physics," a computer-generated flow of great quotations; the Quest Gallery, which documents Mary Baker Eddy’s life and work; the Monitor Gallery, an interactive display that uses the resources of The Christian Science Monitor to explore world events, past and present; and the renovated Mapparium, a three-story, spherical, stained-glass simulation of the globe, constructed in 1935 and long one of the city’s singular attractions.

Throughout, the architects have followed the sensible and sensitive course of refurbishing, wherever possible, existing features and finishes, and of using a contemporary vocabulary for all that is added, thus articulating old and new. The result is a lively blending of elements, including chestnut wall paneling, travertine and terrazzo floors, wrought-iron grillwork, and mosaic-tile ceilings, all retained from the original building, and new features such as a lobby staircase with a stainless-steel stringer and glass balustrade, sleek new birch furniture, and a glass curtain wall.

The library occupies only four floors of the old building, with research and archival spaces on the top two floors and public galleries on the lower levels. These public spaces posed a particular challenge. If the library were truly to be a civic meeting place, it would need to establish a strong presence on its street, which happens to be Massachusetts Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. But the old Publishing Society was not at all a presence on the street. It was literally walled off, separated from the surrounding city by a 14-foot-high limestone wall that sheltered what had been a private garden; the building was entered from the Christian Science Plaza (part of the church headquarters designed in the early 1970s by I.M. Pei and Araldo Cossuta). The architects met this challenge with a skillful and bold gesture: move the entrance from the plaza to the main avenue, tear down the high wall, and extend the lobby toward the street, enclosing the new entry space with a gracefully curved, 16-foot-high glass wall, transparent by day, aglow by night. And from this generous architectural move there followed an equally good landscape strategy, which was to create a garden between the lobby pavilion and the street. Designed by Reed Hilderbrand Associates, the garden, like the architecture, elegantly intermingles old and new. By removing only portions of the Neoclassical wall, the designers created a landscape in which new features, such as a stainless-steel waterwall, work in crisp counterpoint to the imposing heft of the Baroque-style gate.

See the February 2003 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of Project:
The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity

Location:
Boston

Gross square footage:
80,000 sq ft

Total construction cost:
$25 million

Client:
The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity (a non-profit corporation)

Owner:
The First Church of Christ, Scientist owns the building

Architect:
Ann Beha Architects
33 Kingston Street
Boston, MA 02111
t (617) 338-3000
f (617) 482-9097