Projects by Name

Breuer and Tician Papachristou’s designs for an urban high school in Roxbury, Massachusetts, were intended to be part of a slum-clearance project that would also include residential, commercial and industrial buildings. The school complex featured amenities such as a theater that were more commonly found on university campuses. Breuer’s office presented two designs: a 16-storey tower incorporating four “sub-schools” and a low-rise plan consisting of four y-shaped buildings, each 4-stories high. The perspective rendering on the left shows the high rise design and reveals Breuer’s reliance on familiar design elements including muscular piloti and a faceted thin-shell concrete building that had been part of his repertoire since the UNESCO headquarters complex more than a decade earlier. In the end, neither of these schemes was built. Instead, the school built classrooms, a gym and a colonnaded library out of precast concrete panels. According to Isabelle Hyman, much of the school was defaced through vandalism within a year of its opening.