Readers of Robert Campbell’s columns in our pages perhaps don’t know that The Boston Globe’s longtime architecture critic helped the General Services Administration select Thom Mayne and Morphosis to design the San Francisco Federal Building, completed in 2007. “I’ve never seen a building of his that didn’t have major flaws, but I felt he needed a client who could hold his feet to the fire,” Campbell says. He compares the U.S. to the Netherlands, where young architects have greater chances at larger commissions. “Mayne is still somewhat of an enfant terrible and is now only getting the work he has always wanted,” he says. “The Netherlands loves when young architects come up with new ideas.”
Campbell found one such new idea in Office dA’s Macallen building, a condominium development that opened in 2007 in South Boston. He particularly likes the way the architects turned a conventional developer-driven project into a sleek, sloping building—taking advantage of two different zoning requirements for height on the site—in keeping with the firm’s edgy reputation. Campbell says the lack of consensus about what makes good design makes it hard for an architect to justify one design approach over another. “It makes it easier for developers to build cheaply without feeling guilty,” he says, “but also developers from out of town just don’t feel the social pressure to build well.”
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