Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty (CAN) was an architectural firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm's principals were leading modernists, from the 1950s to the 1970s, when International Modernism matured in America. CAN was a successor of Campbell & Aldrich, founded in 1945. Its principals were Walter E. Campbell, [1] Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, and Lawrence Frederick Nulty. [2] In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, the partnership of Aldrich and Nulty designed some of New England's most recognizable and controversial modernist architecture.
Some of the New England structures designed by CAN in a modernist and frequently brutalist idiom are Boston's 100 Federal Street [3] 37-floor skyscraper, formerly known as the First National Bank Building and nicknamed the Pregnant Building; the Lederle Graduate Research Center at the UMass Amherst; the Merrill Science Center at Amherst College; the Weiss Science Tower at Rockefeller University; the Murdough Center at Dartmouth College; [4] and Boston City Hall. [5] [6] [7] A 1976 poll of architects, historians and critics conducted by the American Institute of Architects listed the Boston City Hall with Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia campus and Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater as one of the ten proudest achievements of American architecture in the nation's first two hundred years. [8]
CAN also completed renovations of some of Massachusetts' best known historical buildings, including modern annexes for some. Notable among these renovations and additions are those at Trinity Church (Boston), the only church in the United States and the only building in Boston considered by the American Institute of Architects to be one of the "Ten Most Significant Buildings in the United States"; Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Boston; and Salem, Massachusetts' John Tucker Daland House. [9]
Walter Edward Campbell (died 1993) [10] ) studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his degree in 1926. He was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1959. [11]
Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich (1911–1986) was the son of William Truman Aldrich and grandson of Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich (1841-1915), making him a nephew of Abby Aldrich (Rockefeller) (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) and thus the cousin of her son, Vice President Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. He studied under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and received his architecture degree in 1938. [12] He joined Campbell in 1946 and was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1958. [13]
He was an American modernist architect and a proponent of correlating theories of urbanism and urban planning.[ clarification needed ] He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964. [14] A Boston civic leader, in the 1960s, Aldrich was appointed a distinguished member of that city's Urban Renewal Design Advisory Committee. [15] He was a trustee of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1947-1960), the Boston Arts Festival (1955–62), the Metropolitan Boston Arts Center (1959-1963), the Rhode Island School of Design (1955-1962), Radcliffe College (1957-1972), and the Boston Architectural Center (1968-1973).
Lawrence Frederick Nulty (1921–2019) received his architecture degree from Yale University in 1952. He joined Campbell & Aldrich in 1955. [16]
Wallace Kirkman Harrison was an American architect. Harrison started his professional career with the firm of Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray, participating in the construction of Rockefeller Center. He is best known for executing large public projects in New York City and upstate, many of them a result of his long and fruitful personal relationship with Nelson Rockefeller, for whom he served as an adviser.
Moshe Safdie is an architect, urban planner, educator, theorist, and author, with American, Canadian, and Israeli citizenship. He is known for incorporating principles of socially responsible design in his 50-year career. His projects include cultural, educational, and civic institutions; neighborhoods and public parks; housing; mixed-use urban centers; airports; and master plans for existing communities and entirely new cities in North and South America, the Middle East, and Asia. He is most identified with designing Marina Bay Sands and Jewel Changi Airport, as well as his debut project, Habitat 67, originally conceived as his thesis at McGill University.
Ralph Adams Cram was a prolific and influential American architect of collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings, often in the Gothic Revival style. Cram & Ferguson and Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson are partnerships in which he worked. Cram was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
Modern architecture, or modernist architecture, was an architectural movement or architectural style based upon new and innovative technologies of construction, particularly the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete; the idea that form should follow function (functionalism); an embrace of minimalism; and a rejection of ornament. It emerged in the first half of the 20th century and became dominant after World War II until the 1980s, when it was gradually replaced as the principal style for institutional and corporate buildings by postmodern architecture. According to Le Corbusier the roots of the movement were to be found in the works of Eugène Viollet le duc.
Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich was a prominent American politician and a leader of the Republican Party in the United States Senate, where he represented Rhode Island from 1881 to 1911. By the 1890s, he was one of the "Big Four" key Republicans who largely controlled the major decisions of the Senate, along with Orville H. Platt, William B. Allison, and John Coit Spooner. Because of his impact on national politics and central position on the pivotal Senate Finance Committee, he was referred to by the press and public alike as the "general manager of the Nation", dominating tariff and monetary policy in the first decade of the 20th century.
Benjamin C. Thompson was an American architect. He was one of eight architects who founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in 1945 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the most notable firms in post-war modernism, and then started his own firm, Benjamin Thompson and Associates (BTA), in 1967.
Copley Square, is a public square in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, bounded by Boylston Street, Clarendon Street, St. James Avenue, and Dartmouth Street. The square is named for painter John Singleton Copley. Prior to 1883 it was known as Art Square due to its many cultural institutions, some of which remain today.
Pietro Belluschi was an Italian-American architect. A leading figure in modern architecture, he was responsible for the design of over 1,000 buildings.
Postmodern architecture is a style or movement which emerged in the late 1950s as a reaction against the austerity, formality, and lack of variety of modern architecture, particularly in the international style advocated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The movement was introduced by the architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown and architectural theorist Robert Venturi in their 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas. The style flourished from the 1980s through the 1990s, particularly in the work of Scott Brown & Venturi, Philip Johnson, Charles Moore and Michael Graves. In the late 1990s, it divided into a multitude of new tendencies, including high-tech architecture, neo-futurism, new classical architecture, and deconstructivism. However, some buildings built after this period are still considered postmodern.
Graham de Conde Gund is an American architect and the president of the Gund Partnership, an American architecture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and founded by Gund in 1971. An heir to George Gund II, he is also a collector of contemporary art, whose collection has been widely exhibited and published.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is the graduate school of design at Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It offers master's and doctoral programs in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, urban design, real estate, design engineering, and design studies.
Harry Mohr Weese was an American architect who had an important role in 20th century modernism and historic preservation. His brother, Ben Weese, is also a renowned architect.
Boston City Hall is the seat of city government of Boston, Massachusetts. It includes the offices of the mayor of Boston and the Boston City Council. The current hall was built in 1968 to assume the functions of the Old City Hall.
Martha Brookes Hutcheson was an American landscape architect, lecturer, and author, active in New England, New York, and New Jersey.
Richard Steere Aldrich was an American politician. He was a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and served in the Rhode Island State Senate and the Rhode Island House of Representatives.
The MIT School of Architecture and Planning is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1865 by William Robert Ware, the school offered the first formal architectural curriculum in the United States, and the first architecture program in the world operating within the establishment of a university. MIT SAP is considered a global academic leader in the design field and one of the most accomplished schools in the world. MIT's department of architecture has consistently ranked among the top architecture/built environment schools in the world, and from 2015 to 2018 was ranked highest in the world in QS World University Rankings. In 2019, it was ranked second to The Bartlett but regained the number one position later on in the 2020 rankings.
Robert Campbell is a writer and architect. He is currently an architecture critic for the Boston Globe. He lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
William Truman Aldrich FAIA was an American architect and painter. Though primarily a residential architect, he is also known for large museum buildings in Providence, Rhode Island, Worcester, Massachusetts and elsewhere.
William D. Warner (1929–2012) was an American architect and urban planner in practice in Providence and Exeter, Rhode Island from 1959 to 2012.