I can’t tell you how important it is to have architecture in support of some kind
of social or learning purpose.
This is architecture as a servant rather than an end in itself.
So the aquarium is really an effort to bring people together in common purpose of protecting
the natural world and enjoying intimate engagement with it.
And for me, it was an emotional origin and it came from my own childhood and the sense
of wonder that I had as a child playing with minnows in a pond in Cape Cod.
It wasn’t clear to me that I was going to be designing aquariums.
I had just finished graduate school at Harvard and I was actually interested in the content
of exhibitions much more than I was in the structure of buildings.
But, along came a friend who said to me, “Let’s form a multidisciplinary office.”
And for the next seven years, from 1962 to 1969, we developed the New England Aquarium
design and oversaw its construction and learned, in the course of things, that an aquarium
was an extraordinary building type.
Those little guys, they look like seaweed or something, but they’re living creatures.
The aquarium is a dark magic box that would have power—theatrical impact, emotional
experience—and that could be immersive or that would surround you and make you feel
you were in a world underwater.
An aquatic museum.
The New England Aquarium was conceived as a box, basically a new warehouse, joining
the warehouses of downtown Boston, the granite warehouses that have been so much a part of
that city’s heritage.
But on the inside, it had all kinds of complexity, sculpting with architectural forms.
The composition is a kind of concrete sculpture.
And work its way to the outside as a reinforced concrete system of building.
The effort we were making was to orchestrate the experience rather like a musician does,
composing a piece of music.
It’s linear.
You have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
You have a structure along the way.
You have a complex series of engagements along the way.
The conceptual starting point of our design: we thought we should create a dark space in
which the focus of attention would be on those things which were illuminated.
The central tank, we called it the giant ocean tank.
The idea was that it would act as a kind of lantern in the space.
Another idea behind this tank, this structure, is that these columns, which act as the supporting
structure for the tank, also act as a supporting structure for the ramp.
They have beams underneath them.
So you’re standing on a slab spiraling down on beams that spiral down attached to these
columns.
And that spiral forms a kind of compression ring that holds the water in in the middle.
And the columns are spaced about five feet apart.
So they form little niches where a family of visitors can take possession of this little
space, and it becomes their own little private viewing place.
That allows the rest of the public to go by them, and the flow of people continues, while
they can stay as long as they want, in their chosen window.
It’s not about style.
It’s not about, you know, star architecture at all.
It’s a quality of place that has to do with its content.
There was no separation between architecture and exhibit.
The structure itself became the exhibit, as a theater, a stage for living things.
When we began our aquarium in Boston, we wanted to, you might say, begin to address ecosystems
and behavior and the richer complexities of life.
And do it in a way that was emotionally driven, more than informationally driven.
And then, encourage people to read and to learn after the experience of the encounter.
Well they’ve been very central for my career because the first building that I did was
an aquarium of any kind before I even did the house or any other building type.
And it became a successful prototype of some kind as an urban experience, offering people
something that they hadn’t seen before, which was complexity of life in an urban setting,
which they could enjoy in an hour or an hour and a half and come away with having learned
something and having had a good time.
Urban renewal is a big part of this for me, by the fact that Boston no longer had a freight
basis for its economy by the end of the 19th century.
The port was a pretty much dead place.
Over here there was nothing.
These buildings didn’t exist.
None of those buildings existed.
It was a barren, abandoned waterfront with rotting piers.
It came back to life in the 20th century with urban renewal.
And the aquarium has been able to be a building type that can join in a high-density conglomeration,
you know, become part of an urban, dense core.
Impact on the city is enormous if you have people coming all year round.
So it became an economic engine for redevelopment.
It makes me happy as hell.
Wonderful to see.
Well, the urgency is one of engagement before it’s too late because, for example, the
damage which we’re doing to the global ocean is accelerating.
We are dumping our plastics.
We are dumping our phosphates.
We are limiting the ability of the ocean to sustain this incredible zone of life.
We are urgently needing to look after our planet for the animals and for ourselves as
we are just part of one system.