Giraffe peers down at Mass Pike from WGBH digital mural.
With a 40-by-30-foot video mural in plain sight for Mass Pike motorists entering Boston, WGBH's big new headquarters is likely to become an instant landmark.
The public will get its first sustained look at the powered-up array of light-emitting diodes today, as the station holds its formal ribbon-cutting ceremony.
City Hall was worried by upwelling plans for such displays on other buildings, and WGBH promised that its mural won't get too promotional or have fast motion that distracts drivers.
During the day, the digital mural will show several pictures connected with the day's broadcasts, WGBH told the Boston Globe. At 7 p.m. it will switch to a still image of the night sky. Dancers, a José Orozco mural using older media, a starry image from the Hubble Space Telescope and a scene of clouds in Hawaii will be used the first week.
The building, which the staff gradually filled over the summer, is on Market Street, near where the street crosses over Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90). It's a not-too-fancy light-industrial pocket of the Brighton neighborhood, many blocks west of WGBH's old main building at 125 Western Ave. Staffers say you could still walk to WGBH from Harvard Square in Cambridge, though not as easily.
The old 02134 zip code, implanted in the brains of a whole generation by the sing-song chants of Zoom cast members, has been left behind. The new address is 1 Guest St., Boston, MA 02135.
Near that entrance, late in August, workmen were installing letters that spell out parts of the station's mission statement — about creating programs "that educate, inspire and entertain" — around a curving blue facade.
Despite its size, the $87 million complex won't strike visitors as a palace. The materials aren't deluxe; the studio wing is sheathed in metal siding that makes it look like the big factory that it is.
Unlike traditional office floor plans that reserves most of the outside walls for higher executives, the new building gives rank-and-file cubicle dwellers more nearly equal access to daylight.
The Globe's architecture critic, Robert Campbell, gave the complex a largely positive but bifurcated review yesterday, observing: "A handsome success is wedded to a dowdy loser."
What he calls the loser, with more than half the floor space of the complex, is a seven-story example of real estate speculation that WGBH bought in 2002 after it had stood empty for two years.
The critic prefers the shorter studio wing that WGBH built from scratch across the street. It houses two TV studios, a 200-seat theater for screenings, a big music studio for radio and other production facilities. Props from the recent taping of the children's show Fetch!, including an orange Karmann Ghia and a canoe, were waiting to be carted to storage outside the TV studios.
Connecting the two wings across Guest Street, WGBH built a long, glassed-in two-story bridge full of offices, ending with the video screen that almost seems to project above the highway.
"The bridge is like a yoke that pairs a fresh colt, full of life and spirit, with a tired draft horse," Campbell wrote in the Globe.
Like other pubTV stations that have built new facilities in recent years, WGBH made a point of visually opening its new home to public view.
Before the move, for instance, the daily public radio program The World, produced with PRI and the BBC, had been hidden in floor space created by constructing a second floor where the old building originally had a two-story space for storing sets.
Now neighbors waiting for a bus on a Brighton street corner can look into The World's ground-floor newsroom. And the producers can look out (below). Every newsroom should have a view of a bus stop.
Photos by Steve Behrens, Current, except for top photo by WGBH.
Web page posted Sept. 17, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee
