Athenaeum Press
- Architect
- Lockwood, Greene & Co.
- Year
- 1895
- Style
- Neoclassical
- City
- Boston, MA
Athenæum Press, completed in 1895 at 215 First Street in Cambridge, was built for Edwin Ginn and Ginn & Company to house their printing operations. Lockwood, Greene & Co., a firm known for industrial architecture, designed it using the construction principles of a late-19th-century textile mill, then dressed the whole thing up as a Greek temple for its highly visible site facing the Charles River and Longfellow Bridge.
the building
A temple for a print shop. The front of the building is worked in brick, patinated copper, and glass to resemble an Ancient Greek temple, and it's topped with a statue of Athena sculpted by Adio diBiccari — ornament layered onto a structure built on mill-construction logic.
Guastavino tile vaults. The tile vaults inside were designed by the Guastavino Company, the firm whose thin-tile vaulting technique appears in landmark buildings across the era.
the style
Neoclassical dressing for an industrial building, chosen because the site was so visible from the river and bridge — hence the Greek-temple front and the Athena statue crowning it.
More on Neoclassicalthe architect
Lockwood, Greene & Co. was a noted industrial architecture firm; Athenæum Press shows their approach to giving a mill-construction printing plant a monumental public face.
significance
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. It was the third major printing house built in Cambridge, after those of Harvard University.
nearby
- Arthur D. Little Inc., Building
- Wiesner building
- Benjamin Hoyt House
- Sacred Heart Church, Rectory, School and Convent
- Green Building
- Ether Dome