People/Products

Preservation and Modernism might seem to have contradictory goals, but not for architects Bruner/Cott. The Cambridge, Massachusetts'based firm is renovating and restoring Boston University's Law Tower and has just completed a 93,000-square-foot addition at its base. The half-century-old 18-story tower is a key element in a collection of five 1960s buildings designed by Josep Llu's Sert, the Corbusier-influenced architect and urban designer who fled to the United States from fascist Spain in the 1939. They occupy a site on the university's central campus between busy Commonwealth Avenue and the Charles River in Boston's Fenway-Kenmore section. In addition to the tower, the Brutalist concrete grouping includes two libraries, a student union, and a central boiler plant, making up what Bruner/Cott calls “a rare grouping of significant works by a single, internationally known architect.”