The 14-acre Christian Science Plaza, Boston’s largest privately owned open space, needed restoration and repair work to make it more welcoming to both the community and visitors year-round, at any time of the day.  

Designed in 1968 by I.M. Pei & Partners’ Araldo Cossutta and Sasaki Associates’ Stu Dawson, the site is a national icon and a designated Boston landmark. The project is the first comprehensive restoration in 45 years.  

To make the plaza design more inviting, the team made subtle yet effective changes that respected the landmark plaza’s minimalist mid-century design.  

They began by making the perimeter more open to welcome people in. This included adding new entry signs at each of the three unmarked gateways. The Huntington Gateway involved shortening the 700-foot-long reflecting pool by 16 feet to create a clear and accessible plaza entry. A fourth gateway called the Beach transformed a once shapeless and uninviting space at the Huntington Avenue and Belvidere street corner into an active zone, introducing a tilted lawn panel and granite seat walls to accommodate spillover from the nearby Children’s Fountain, while new gateway signs and a break in an existing concreate seat wall, which previously blocked access, now provide a direct path into the plaza.  

The original Plaza design left few places for sitting, and those in place were uninviting. To add seating without clutter, the design team adapted original curbs into seat walls using the same design language. The team created open ‘nooks’ along Huntington Avenue by removing two raised planters and adding large wood platform benches for additional seating.  

Meanwhile, along the Massachusetts Avenue edge, a disheveled line of 13 concrete platform benches beneath a row of mature red oaks was too fragile to reset without crumbling, so the design team replaced them with wooden platform benches in the exact same dimensions, to honor the original mid-century design intent while providing more warmth to the community’s open space.