Row Houses and Streetcar Suburbs:
Why Boston Looks the Way it Does
A Lecture by Charles Duff
Boston: an iconic American city. Beantown, The Hub, Titletown, City on a Hill, the Athens of America— whatever you want to call it, there’s no denying that Boston is in a league of its own. As beautiful as Boston is, it's also an odd city with an architectural history like no other. There are two basic ways of building an American city, and Boston is the only city that is a great example of both. Why did this happen? Why didn’t it happen everywhere? Join AAI and speaker Charles Duff at Harvard as we explore the unique makeup of our storied town.
5:00 pm
Thursday, April 24
Sever 202
Harvard University
Join us 9-11 am the following morning (Friday, April 25) for a free architectural tour of the city.
Charles Duff
Charles Duff is a planner and property developer based in Baltimore. He has restored more than 300 historic buildings, built or restored a number of large buildings for affordable housing and the arts, and led the planning and development efforts that created stable housing markets in old city neighborhoods with roughly 100,000 residents. His 2023 book The North Atlantic Cities argues that the UK, the Netherlands, and the East Coast of the US form an architectural and urbanistic region in which practitioners and government officials should learn from each other’s successes and failures. He has degrees from Amherst and Harvard, spent a delightful year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and was for many years an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins. He has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from both Preservation organizations and the Urban Land Institute, the US trade association for property developers.