In 1964, the Law Tower at Boston University opened, whereupon it quickly ran afoul of students and faculty. The building, which was designed by Josep Lluís Sert, was unaccommodating and averse to modification. In a bid to rectify these problems, Boston firm Bruner/Cott both renovated and added to the tower in 2015. Courtesy Richard Mandelkorn
Through his campus work, Sert left an incredible built legacy on the Boston area. But his buildings have taken some getting used to.
In hindsight, it seems a bit odd that a Catalan architect with a penchant for concrete buildings and jaunty accents of color—he liked to say, “It’s good to see a parrot against an elephant”—ever held sway over Brahmin Boston and nearby Cambridge. It was midcentury, and he was Josep Lluís Sert, Barcelona-born, a great devotee of Le Corbusier, and dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) from 1953 to 1969.
