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An eye for history

Explaining a town hall addition, Beha says: "It's important how the buildings come together; you can't just bash them together, they must flow. The collision of old and new: No good! No good!"

Ann M. Beha, architect, is striding briskly across the breezy Christian Science plaza on Huntington Avenue with a gaggle of church officials. Tall and animated, talking and gesturing as she goes, she's heading for the Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity, under construction in the Christian Science Publishing Society building on Massachusetts Avenue.

Due to open next year, the library will transform the 1932 building, home of the Christian Science Monitor (temporarily housed in a nearby church building), from a grim Fort Knox hemmed in by a 12-foot wall to a lit-up, y'all-come sort of place with a wide glass "lantern" entrance, an outside fountain, and a public park. The library will house works by Eddy, including 500,000 pages of previously unpublished writings, plus multimedia exhibits and rooms for reading, meetings, and lectures - all open to the public.

Beha pauses in the plaza near Massachusetts Avenue. As young people lounge on the grassy strip near the sidewalk, she explains why the library's new entrance will face outward onto the avenue instead of sideways onto the plaza, as the old door does. "The idea," she says, "is to make a gesture on Massachusetts Avenue. It's meant to express something particular: an engaging and youthful image on a city street. The church wants their blessings to be available to the public, to lose the [past] association with secrecy and privacy and be more available. The motivating spirit is, `Let's share and respond to the public.' "

The Mary Baker Eddy Library is unquestionably the brainchild of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, as the four church officials along on the tour make amply clear. Still, one can't help noticing, as she strides about the unoccupied building, pointing out design elements that will project the new ethos of openness, that Ann Beha has marinated in this client's mission and made it her own. At times she almost sounds like a church representative herself. That missionary melding of architect and client is a distinctive mark of the Ann Beha style. It's never just the building. It's the Vision.

Boston's Ann Beha, 50, is hardly a prominent name outside the architecture field. Inside, it's a different story. "Ann's reputation, locally and nationally, is peerless," says Richard Fitzgerald, director of the Boston Society of Architects. "She's considered one of the finest preservation architects in the United States. And her practice is now much broader than just preservation." Her firm's work is half restoration, half new construction, and all of it is for nonprofit clients.

If her name isn't a household word, Beha's public profile is nonetheless rising, mainly because her 40-architect firm is handling two prestigious, big-ticket projects on Massachusetts Avenue, plus a smaller job not far away. MOBesides those projects, Beha is drafting the long-range master plan for the renovation of the headquarters of the Massachusetts Historical Society, an elegant Renaissance-revival manse a few blocks awayon upper Boylston Street. Like Symphony Hall, it's a National Historic Landmark.

She's also done smaller projects, such as the restored Robert Gould Shaw/54th Regiment Memorial on Boston Common, the refurbished glass roof over the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum courtyard, and the shop and cafe at Harvard's Fogg Museum. More ambitious renovations and additions include the Nantucket Atheneum; Worcester Academy; the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown; the Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge; historic churches in Boston, Hanover, and Weymouth; and town halls in Andover and Weston. Beyond Massachusetts, Beha's portfolio includes dozens of libraries, museums, theaters, school dormitories, and chapels from Maine to Connecticut.

In increasing demand outside New England, Ann Beha has designed large academic and museum projects in New York, Tennessee, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida. Notably this year, the firm completed a six-year, $20 million redesign and reconstruction of Oregon's sprawling Portland Art Museum.

With her work on these and other major projects, the Beha signature is showing up more and more all over the city, region, and country.

The job that did the most to make Beha's name for blending old and new was the restoration of Boston's Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory of Music, completed in 1995. She had never done a job that complex, she says, but went at it with intensity. The 92-year-old hall had had little work done on it since 1938. It needed modern heating, lighting, and amenities to match the aesthetic restoration.

"She did what I would call archeological digging in hidden areas," says Lawrence Lesser, former president of the New England Conservatory of Music. "She found hidden layers of paint - the proscenium arch was brown; she found it was originally emerald green." Beha searched out a Michigan company equipped to restore the hall's patented wood and wrought-iron chairs and brought in floorboards from old factory buildings in North Carolina to restore the stage floor correctly for the building's era. "The goal was for people to say, `What did you spend the $8 million on?' " Lesser says. "Nobody was supposed to notice, and that's pretty much what happened."

Beyond design work, the Beha product includes a combination of directness and tactful nudging of clients to think bigger and wider. "In the beginning," Beha says, "we accept the premises our clients give us, but we just keep looking and probing. Often what the client says is needed is only a piece of what is needed. At the Nantucket Atheneum we were told we could do anything we wanted, but we couldn't build an addition. So what did we build? An addition. And they said you can't touch the park, and what did we do? We changed the park and made a new park."

Charlotte Louisa Maison, director of the atheneum, a library and cultural center founded in 1847, says the board members had wanted to remodel the building within the original footprint but changed their minds when they saw Beha's proposals. Beha and associate Pamela Hawkes offered two plans: one within the footprint and one with a redesigned garden and a new children's wing. The second plan was accepted. "We needed that space for children," Maison says. "It was beautifully designed to mirror the historic building but not so imitative that it looked like a tacky add-on." As it turned out, the children's wing was a big selling point in the capital campaign.

The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan in 1996 planned a limited renovation for its 1961 building, a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill structure based on a Mies van der Rohe design. Beha and 24 other architects were invited to an early presentation and were asked for their thoughts. Most of them were reserved and said little, recalls executive director James Bridenstine. Except for Ann Beha, who was outspoken on one point.

"We had hoped to stay open during the renovation," Bridenstine says. "She stood up and said, `Every museum wants to be open during this kind of construction, but from my experience, that's difficult, expensive, and won't serve the community.' "

She got the museum board's attention. After visiting Boston and viewing Jordan Hall, the members ultimately hired Ann Beha Associates. They ended up with more than they bargained for. "Ann told me, `There are going to be times when you'll be really upset with me,' " says Bridenstine, "and there was such a time - this cost a lot more than we thought it would, and there may be a few people in Kalamazoo who are still mad. We had raised money for a 14,000-square-foot addition, and Ann came back with a 14,000-square-foot addition; then she showed us a 20,000-square-foot addition. In the end, we built a 32,000-square-foot addition. I had to go raise another $3 million. The highest compliment I can pay is that there is nothing I would change."

In the mid-1980s, Beha designed a renovation of the Dixon Gallery, a museum in Memphis directed at the time by John Buchanan. In 1994, Buchanan was being wooed for the job of director by the then-102-year-old Portland Art Museum, which had several buildings in severe need of modernization, including two by legendary Italian architect Pietro Belluschi.

Buchanan says he took one look at the extent of the problems and told the search committee, " `I'm not your guy.' They said please come back, and I said, `Only if you let me bring an architect.' So I flew from Memphis to Portland, and Ann flew from Boston. I wanted her to look at the facilities and tell me what I was going to be dealing with. She is so incredibly smart and savvy about how museums operate. She said, `I think you can do this.' I took the job in June 1994, on Ann's recommendation."

The $20 million project was finished this past summer. Buchanan says, "We've just completed a 60,000-square-foot expansion that has yielded 47,000 square feet devoted to the permanent collection, a new visitor services center with shop, cafe, and educational space. It was a tremendous success."

Moving that big a project ahead means dealing with numerous interested parties, not all of them receptive to an outlander's ideas. Beha knows what she thinks and says so, which is bound to rub some people the wrong way. Buchanan says, "Ann does not suffer fools gladly." Which doesn't mean she can't suffer them at all, especially when they're on a client's board.

Buchanan recalls an occasion in Memphis: "The museum was very old-line. There was something I wanted that was a little controversial. I'll never forget Ann speaking to the trustees. In 10 minutes she had the most ardent opponent eating out of her hand. When I've had issues that made me twist in my seat, I had her put them forward."

The Eddy Library and Symphony Hall exemplify Beha's point of view: both minute and sweeping. She's planning and designing for bricks and mortar, but she's also thinking about the street, neighborhood, and city. Early in the Christian Science project, she sat in her parked car for an hour or so and noticed that Massachusetts Avenue is full of young people - students from Northeastern University, Berklee College of Music, and the New England Conservatory. "That's important," she says, "because it's the future audience of all these institutions. The engagement of youth requires a visual communication that is not what historical buildings offer."

While thinking about design, she's been trying to convene the local players and get them to think together, think Vision. The Christian Science Church and the BSO have already had discussions on common interests, but Beha sees no reason to stop there. "I'm trying to bring together various leaders around Mass. Avenue," Beha says, "people in the neighborhood, to join with the [Boston Redevelopment Authority] and the BSO . It's fine for me to define the issues, but we need to take in a bigger audience. The overall issue is, how does this part of the city retrieve its sense of celebration?"

If Ann Beha's take on architecture is unusual, so was her path to the profession. She grew up on 3d Avenue in lower Manhattan, not far from the United Nations, in a family committed to the arts and the urban scene. "I lived in a 19th-century house, four stories, 12 feet wide by 100 deep. My parents wouldn't think of living anywhere else. They took us to the theater, to the Met - not that they had unlimited resources, but what we did, we did in the city, around a lot of culture, which took place in buildings."

She went to Catholic schools, then to Wellesley College, where she invented her own major: American urban history. She studied historic changes in housing in 19th-century Salem and became fascinated by the way buildings expressed social ideas and values. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wellesley had cross-registration, so she took classes at MIT in urban history, then in architecture, by which, she says, "I became hooked."

After graduation in 1972, she applied to MIT 's program in architecture. The response was not at first encouraging, but she was persistent. "I had to sell myself," she recalls. "I really had no background in design. The interviewer said I should go to law school. I told him I was going somewhere to architecture school, no matter what." In the end, she was accepted at MIT .

With her interest in history and design, it was a short step to preservation. She received her master's degree in 1975 and would have gone right to work, but MIT 's incoming architecture department head, N. John Habraken, asked her to stay on for a year and a half as his assistant. "She is not a person whose arm is easily twisted," says Habraken, who now lives in the Netherlands, "but she agreed. She knew the faculty and the department's recent history and could inform me about people's needs and agendas and surely saved me from many mistakes. Her understanding of people and situations was lucid and in-depth and often merciless."

Meanwhile, she was already accepting consultation work, some of it in association with other firms, and took on the new wing of the Cambridge Center for Adult Education as well as restoration projects on the First Baptist Church in Central Square (her first restoration project), Harvard-Epworth Church, and the Old South Church in Boston's Copley Square. She found no lack of work.

"The competition for those clients was not significant," she says. "There weren't that many people who did preservation, and the architectural profession didn't particularly respect it. They thought people who did preservation were those who couldn't get jobs doing new buildings. I got a lot of jobs and worked for seven or eight years before I met Pam."

Pamela Hawkes is another of the firm's principals; the third is Thomas Hotaling. Hawkes joined when the firm had five or six employees and was operating out of the four-story Greek Revival house on Beacon Hill where Beha and husband Robert Radloff still live with their two daughters, Macy, 13, and Allison, 16. Hawkes says, "We have similar attitudes which started from an interest in historic buildings and what they mean for communities." There was another point of appeal: "The firm where I was was dominated by men at the top, and I didn't see a clear path for myself."

Beha is not the first woman in Boston to have made a successful career in architecture - Joan Goody of Boston's Goody, Clancy is another - but it was a male-dominated field when she broke in, and it took gumption to deal with guys who might not have taken her as seriously as they would a man. No shrinking violet, she was equal to any obstacles.

"In 1976, it was primarily men masons and laborers," says Carl Jay, director of preservation for Shawmut Construction, who has done a major job with Beha every year since she started her practice. "One of her specialties was masonry restoration - she knew how to mix mortars and cut joints and do it right in 17th-, 18th-century buildings. I remember her once on a job, with her green boots and her springer spaniel tied to the staging, going up with these burly masons and telling them to cut the bricks by hand. She would say, `You're damaging these historic bricks!' She would have them cut by hand with special tools. It took a strong character to force these tradesmen to do it right."

"Her directness and confidence are admirable and amazing," says architect Jan Abell of Abell Garcia in Tampa, Florida, who worked with Beha on two restorations there. "I am a woman doing similar work, and in some cases I might be a bit mushier, but in her case, maybe her mom and dad said, `You can do anything, kid,' because that really comes across. People say she's tough, but what I hear is, `I know what I am doing,' and she does."

Beha says that she did not set out to found a women's architecture firm and that the firm has long been diverse in gender: "Contribution is the issue, not anything else." But she adds, "I am very committed to women in our profession."

Habraken recalls that "her fledgling office became a place for young female architects to work. I remember once getting a phone call from Ann asking me to look out for good students about to graduate because she needed more help in the firm. I asked, `Ann, would it be all right if the candidate is male?' Without a pause she said, `That's fine, if he's willing to make tea.' "

The cramped vestibule of 33 Kingston Street, a block from Downtown Crossing, gives no hint of the activity going on upstairs. The office of Ann Beha Associates has no reception area: The tiny elevator opens on a Santa's Workshop of architects, cluttered desks and tables, computers, models, and walls hung with drawings and sketches.

Beha appears and leads a fast-moving tour, introducing architects, describing new and completed projects: a performing arts hall at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the master plan for Worcester Academy, the visitors' center for the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. She moves from desk to desk like a pollinating bee or like someone showing off a personal collection, digging out slides and photographs.

She pauses at the desk of architect Jeff Delvy, who is working on an addition to the Weston Town Hall. Delvy shows a study model of the new and old parts of the building and points to a section that will link them. "It's one of the smallest elevations in the building but the most problematical," he says, and Beha explains: "It's important how the two buildings come together; you can't just bash them together, they must flow. The collision of old and new: No good! No good!"

The flow between old and new is not only a tension in a given building but in Beha herself. With a historian's training, she is imbued with a love of landmark buildings and their power in the present when renewed and enhanced. "Part of the beauty of working on existing buildings is that you can go out and assess them," she says, "whereas you have to live in your imagination in new buildings."

Yet there are constraints in a practice that focuses overwhelmingly on what already exists. Not that the practitioners are limited. "This firm is no longer a preservation firm," insists Beha principal Hotaling. "We are a contemporary practice. We do new buildings; we are about going forward. I don't feel limited, none of us feels limited."

That's clearly true of the founder, too, but she is still aware of the profession's supercilious attitude toward preservation. "Herbert Muschamp [the New York Times architecture critic] has called preservation an annoyance which has inhibited creativity in cities," Beha says, "holding us back from thinking more cleverly and creatively about the future."

Beha disagrees strongly: "What you want as an architect is to be responsible and also astonishing." Asked if she envies the architect who gets to create a building "from scratch," she answers emphatically: "There is no scratch."

Nevertheless, she looks around and sees marquee names, people she calls "the sculptors," coming into Boston and getting high-profile jobs: Frank Gehry for the Ray and Maria Stata computer science building at MIT , Renzo Piano for a Harvard museum building on the Charles River, Rafael Vinoly for the massive new convention center in South Boston. Those guys aren't much worried about context - they make their own. Much as she loves the kind of work that has made her firm and reputation, one senses in Beha an itch to step up and out.

"The point is not to get bigger," she says, "but better. I feel we have not yet built enough new buildings in major cities. I have built churches and school buildings, but if I could carve the future it would be a balance of that rich heritage in combination with new expression. I would like to do more housing, retail, things that really transform the heart of the city. Our office is a player in these kinds of projects but has not yet reached the level where we are the top pick."

We're sitting in Ann Beha's kitchen on Beacon Hill early one morning, drinking juice out of Tom-and-Jerry glasses and talking about her kids, how she met her husband (college: He was at Boston University when she was at Wellesley), and her outside interests.

She likes new and classic fiction - Corelli's Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres, and the novels of Henry James and Jane Austen - and books on organizational strategy and reform: "I'm surfing for how to get the deliverables of my life out there more effectively. The culture of our office is critical, so whenever I read about how other businesses do it, I'm kind of taping." She loves music and theater. "I love to go to New York, I love traveling; travel is a big thing in this family.

"I paint watercolors," she says. "Still lifes, landscapes - there are some in the office. I noticed you walked by them but didn't genuflect. I'm a swimmer, a Pepsi-Lite athlete. When I consider hotels when I travel, I'm also looking for a pool or an exercise room. Conference facilities? Hell, no! Fax? Who wants a fax?"

Beha often works 12 to 15 hours a day, yet still has a private life, partly because she can walk to work, and because her husband works two days a week in the investment field and spends the rest of his time as a family man and a volunteer in the arts. Among other things, he was head of Boston's First Night for several years and is an overseer of WGBH and a trustee of the Gardner Museum. Beha, too, is active in arts organizations - the Museum of Fine Arts, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities - and serves on faculty search committees at MIT .

Born a New Yorker, she's a thoroughgoing Bostonian, right down to complaining about the glacial pace of broad-scale redevelopment. Her preservation self looks back longingly at earlier times, when great buildings like Trinity Church or the Boston Public Library or Symphony Hall were imagined, planned, and built with confidence and elan. "Why has it taken so long for Boston to realize that City Hall Plaza needs to be refreshed and made more vibrant?" she asks. "This would not be true in Toronto or many Southern cities. There would be civic leaders who would say, `Let's just do it.' "

Of the struggle over the South Boston Waterfront, she asks: "Where is the civic vision? The vision is that we will have the finest public and private waterfront on the East Coast, and by a certain date we will have public access, housing, green space, and a subway line; we will have community, we will be the Vancouver of America. I'm not opposed to process, but process works best when there is truly a passion blended with it. There's a point at which someone needs to step in and say, `OK, we have the process, but we also have a vision.' "

The wades with zest into the complex, messy process of thrashing out architectural plans with groups. "It's all group decision-making, never one-on-one," she says. "I love public outreach, public spirit; I'm sort of a junkie for civic life and cultural life." Successful designs, she says, "not only connect us to the building but also to the clients, people, community. It's part of the reason why we don't do houses, we don't do work that's one-on-one."

Seeing her taste for the maelstrom of competing interests, for talking, negotiating, and pressing the flesh, one easily imagines Ann Beha would have been a knockout politician. She sent an e-mail message from home late one night, after a community meeting in Cambridge about the new Buckingham, Browne & Nichols science and technology building on Craigie Street: "It was great. I like the engagement and the discussion about design - makes us work harder, raise the bar . . . good stuff." For most architects, community meetings are a drag; for her, they're more like a drug.

"My assumption about the world around me," she says, "is that things will come together and this building will work and people will be satisfied and there will be a beautiful result; that if we work hard and let our minds expand, something wonderful will happen. I'm a believer."

That belief has helped at times to nail jobs that a humbler bidder might have lost. She bid early on the Christian Science project but was cut from the list of finalists. It didn't sit right with her. "I just felt we were right for that job," she says, "so I worked hard to ask for another look, went to meet with them, and ended up getting the job."

Beha's manner is a spicy mix of disarming friendliness and self-effacing wit, pouring out of a mind that is always chewing, churning, revising, as if to say, "Have I got it right? Should I look at it another way?" One can't have a decade of Catholic education without being warned once or twice about the sin of pride, without a trace of worry about missing something, about making a big mistake.

"Ann could make you do a hundred paint samples for one church," says Carl Jay of Shawmut Construction, "and she may have 10 or 12 colors in one section of cornice and ceiling. She is driven, she wants things right. You are doing it for her, and she wants to be sure you understand. Yet she is willing to listen, she's open to a better way to do it."

She's also ready to party when work is done. "We have to have a sense of humor," she says. "We have to have fun; we're not in this to make people miserable but to make life more enjoyable." After much high-minded talk about civic culture, before we leave the kitchen, she just has to move a chair back to show me a neat little antique-looking fireplace appliance with glass "coals" that light up and flicker when you throw a switch. An architect's toy: It's beautiful, and it works.

She thinks hard and answers every question carefully, and always there is that sense of reconsideration. She locks the front door after our interview, and as we walk over the hill to the Charles Street subway stop, she says suddenly, "I was thinking about when you asked me what I do in my free time. I thought, `Why don't you tell him you don't have any free time?' "