I Want To Be Metropolitan: Boston Case Study

(Paperback)

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Explores the efforts the city of Boston has made to grow and develop whilst avoiding expansion on a large scale. The architects give their own ideas for future projects, as well as examining the city's metropolitan characteristics.

I Want To Be Metroplitan is a research on small scale metropolises, MINI Metropolis, using Boston as a case study to provide a different reading of the city. The study focuses on showing the efforts that the city of Boston has made in order to grow with metropolitan characteristics while remaining at a much smaller scale than cities like New York, London, or Tokyo. The morphology of Boston has been achieved through different metropolitan interventions that occur at different scales. These are divided at an infrastructural scale, urban scale, and architectural scale. By means of analysing these different aspects, we can compose a vision of a future Boston, or Fictitious Boston, derived from its metropolitan potential. The book is structured into four chapters addressing the different scales of analysis. The first chapter compiles general data of the city, and provides a background view at the infrastructural efforts that the city has done to accommodate its population. Examples of these are the Big Dig, land reclamation, and its transportation network. These are efforts that are very difficult to find in other cities of similar scale, and provide the first clue towards the potential of the future of Boston, and its current success. The second chapter identifies Boston's poly-centrality, a characteristic that appears in big metropolitan cities like Tokyo. Rather than having a single civic centre or a downtown, Boston accommodates different urban cores such as, an industrial core, an institutional core, a commercial core, and others, within the confinements of its limited area. The chapter is subdivided into separate sections to explain each core and their significance in the city.

Author Bio

Dongwoo Yim is a co-founder and principal of PRAUD, and a faculty member of Rhode Island School of Design. He received a Master of Architecture in Urban Design at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and bachelor's degree at Seoul National University. Rafael Luna is a co-founder and principal of PRAUD. He received his Master of Architecture degree from MIT, and has professional experience at Toyo Ito Associates, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, KPF London and Machado and Silvetti Assoc.