A HOUSE FOR BREATHING RUMOR Issue 31

By Julian Geltman May ‘23

In Boston there exists a network of structures known as Ven- Main Character: Vent Building #7
tilation Buildings. They work together to air out the extensive Design Cast: TAMS (final design), Gannett Fleming, URS,
underground hive-works that were constructed as part of the Wallace Floyd Design Group, Stull & Lee (Coordinating archi-
Big Dig, a project that began in the early ‘80s and was complet- tectural and engineering team, initial designers)
ed in 2007. The Big Dig not only obscured I-93, enabling a more 50 Harborside Drive, Boston, MA
humane downtown Boston, but also widened its causeways. As Completed 1997
part of the re-humanization effort of the reclaimed surface, the
Ventilation buildings were constructed as the project neared
completion, linking the space for new development to what was
vent building for the MBTA’s Orange Line, which camouflages it-
hidden below. These structures exist all throughout South and
self against Goody Clancy’s Tent City Apartment Building. Many
East Boston, emerging as vestigial cairns to the underground
of these projects are magnificent, but #7 is the best, a feeling
network that traverses the Shawmut Peninsula. If these routes
the Boston Society of Architects concurred with in 1999 when
of travel are the ‘central’ arteries of the city, then the air that
they conferred their Harleston Parker medal for Most Beauti-
permits their operation is oxygen-endowed blood, and the tun-
ful Building to it. It is high-tech, but its functions are not merely
nel vents are organs that automate the flow and oxygenation of
dramatic; it shows and also does. Rendering the unsightly as an
blood through the body. These buildings swallow the sea air, and
important urban artifact was part of the design intent, as Stull &
expel the toxins generated by the everyday coming and going
Lee’s own David Lee purported that “the objective was to pro-
of hundreds of thousands of cars.
duce a building that while clear about its purpose went beyond
being simply utilitarian.” 1
My personal favorite of these service-structures is Ventilation
Building #7, primarily designed by Boston-based practice Stull &
Like many of its peers, Vent Building #7 is a massive shed-ob-
Lee. Other notable ventilation buildings (read: spinoff characters)
ject erected with a singular raison d’etre: facilitating air renew-
include vent building #8 in the North End which beckons I-93
al by pumping air in and out of Boston’s underground tunnels.
travelers as a lantern-lit glass-brick beacon, vent building #4 with
Fourteen colossal outtake fans project the exhaust air up and
its pylon-like stacks above Haymarket, and another Stull & Lee’s
out of the triangular chimneys that sit atop the building. At the
same time, ten intake fans pull in fresh air through the perme-
able skin of the building, pumping it down into the bowels of
subterranean Boston, long since hollowed out so as to enable
the passage of vehicles to and from Logan Airport.

The structural basis of Vent Building #7 is a steel frame with

interspersing concrete panels. The rectangular building con-
sists of two adjacent halves, bisected vertically. The first half is
monotonous, but there are moments where the mass of con-
crete is broken, oscillating a push and pull maneuver. The vents
themselves are concrete rectangles that project into the sky,
each adorned with a cap composed of square metallic panels,
2 across and 3 high. The upper panels are cut diagonally to
form a triangle in profile. Towards the rear of the structure, the
facade composition of the second half shifts to long ribbons of
dark gray louvers, denoting their role as the sites of air intake.
These intakes are buttressed by large concrete piers (with the
same form as the venting towers).

Princeton University rumor@ www.

School of Architecture princeton.edu rumor.reviews
This project shares many themes and threads with other proj-
ects of Stull & Lee. The practice was founded by Donald Stull
after a stint working for The Architects Collaborative. While at
TAC, Stull worked on another infrastructure project that even-
tually got shelved after community pushback against moving
the highway to run through MIT’s Campus. Stull started the
practice individually and was later joined by David Lee who
eventually would go on to become a partner. As one of the few
firms led by black architects, Stull & Lee was a pioneering group
practice in the City of Boston, especially so when Stull started
the practice in the 1960s.2 This often meant they worked on
public-sector projects such as the Southwest Corridor project.
This vent building is evocative of much or their work oriented
around transit, and characterized by slick industrial appearanc-
es. Their designs for the Roxbury Community College and their
contributions to the design of the Orchard Gardens K-8 School,
both in historically black neighborhoods that bore the brunt
of redlining in Boston, mark a few of the firm’s extraordinary My favorite buildings are the aortas that keep this circula-
projects. Along the trend of rendering the unseen seen, these tory system going. I like them for the funny hats they wear.
projects stand as testament to Stull & Lee’s stalwart belief in Sometimes buildings aren’t explicitly for people; the air needs
the capacity of the architect and planner to enact systemic buildings too. And expressive ones at that, that can evoke archi-
change at the urban scale: a political endeavor that Lee even tectural wonder – along with a number of other contradictory
sought to lobby state and federal government to act on when and unresolving themes and emotions, unfolding great para-
he was president of the Boston Society of Architects in the late doxical richness. These are buildings for air for people, though,
1980s and early 1990s. and in thinking about them, I am drawn into discussions on the
ecological functioning of the city, racial injustice in planning and
Like many other infrastructures, it deals with mitigation, spatial distribution, and colonial mindsets of climate control.
maintenance, and metabolism, and as such, is not merely a They speak to the control of flows and nefarious structures
monument. The negative externalities of the modern urban of power, and are complicit in a system that perpetuates and
metropolis, namely air pollution, must be dealt with somewhere, props up slow harm. I slow myself down, I match the rhythm
else the city risks suffocation. The Inner Belt, the Central Artery, of the diaphragm that pushes air into and out of these tunnels.
the Big Dig; all projects facilitate the transportation of bodies We cannot see the air moving through these structures, but we
from the suburbs into downtown and then out again at the end can see these structures as signifiers to the harm done by air
of the workday. These infrastructures are the artifacts of a car- pollution and those who pollute.
centric urban design initiative that engendered white flight and
led to the perception of many of Boston’s neighborhoods as 1
https://cityworksinc.wordpress.com/tag/vent-building-no-7
“blighted.” This perception was then construed as a legitimate 2
https://www.architects.org/news/remembering-donald-l-stull-faia
reason to bulldoze the highway through them after the
remaining white neighborhoods decided that it should not cut
through MIT. Before the arteries, there were neighborhoods, Julian Geltman is an architectural designer, critic, and member of AGONY (the Archi-
and the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway above I-93 serves more as tecture Group of New York). He is a recent graduate of the Master of Architecture
a scar masking the real malaise below than a pretty park. The program at MIT, has spent way too much time in Boston, and gets car sick too easily.
narrative of this daily flow is one tinged by racial inequity and
systematic violence through unfair distribution of the costs of Front: Ventilation Building #7, courtesy of the author; back: Fans in the Building,
a car-centric culture. courtesy of Stull & Lee.