The Christian Science Plaza

medium: legal pad paper, pen, tape, the mother church of christian science

I've always found the Christian Science Plaza to be kind of a corporate, brutalist monstrosity, so I was kind of surprised to learn that it had an entry in Boston's POPS list. To me, it feels like the space is intended to be used by the surrounding office workers (or, as it were, Church members/staff), not to be generally available to the public. I think that feeling comes from the fact that everything feels perfectly arranged and extremely geometric, in a way that feels like it's intended to be like 1950s modernist office chic?

The surrounding buildings (which were constructed simultaneously with and as a part of the plaza) are all imposing geometric monoliths.

This is 177 Huntington (neé The Administrative Building):

This is The Colonnade Building (101 Belvidere St):

And Reflection Hall (235 Huntington):

But arguably the most important building in the plaza is The Mother Church of The First Church of Christ:

The Church of Christ, Scientist was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879 after she experienced a healing she said was due to her reading the Bible. A core belief of Christian Science is the ability to be healed through prayer, rather than through medical intervention. This has been a major source of criticism of the church, like in the 80s and 90s, when some Christian Scientist parents were charged with manslaughter after their children died due to lack of medical intervention.

The Christian Science Plaza was designed and built in the late 60s and 70s as a modernization of the Mother Church. Reflection Hall, the Colonnade, and 177 Huntington were all added to the site as a part of this modernization, which is why the brutalist architecture of those buildings is so different from the Romanesque style of the Church itself. The plaza and buildings were all designed by Stu Dawson and Araldo Cossuta. 177 Huntington was originally where the administrative staff of the Church worked, but because of major financial hurdles the Church has faced, they now rent out the space as an office building.

My Intervention

Because of the highly corporate aesthetic of the space, I wanted to do something that would evoke that sort of corporate feeling, while also being a piece of subtle religious iconography that sort of inscrutably mocks the Church in a corporate passive-aggressive way.

I wrote a message on legal pad, that sort of structured like a corporate email, and uses a few stereotypical corporate lingo phrases to get that sort of corporate feeling I wanted. The message subject is a reference to the Christian Scientists' belief in healing through prayer. The letter is addressed to Mary (as in Mary Baker Eddy), and is from "Martin", which is referring to Martin Luther, because I thought the religious reference connected to everything really well.