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The Josiah Quincy Community School and Community Center is one of the finest examples of Brutalist architecture in Boston. The building, completed in 1976 by The Architects Collaborative (TAC), is in Chinatown perched above a sunken expressway, the treacherous “Mass Pike.” It featured prominently in a 2021 retrospective curated by Gabriel Cira, James Heard, and Emma Pfeiffer at Pinkcomma Gallery and MIT about TAC.
Across the street from TAC’s masterpiece now stands an extension to the Josiah Quincy School by HMFH Architects, a Cambridge, Massachusetts office. The Josiah Quincy Upper School opened its doors to students this fall. The site HMFH negotiated was a slender one, given Chinatown’s hyper-density, so the architects responded with a dynamic high-rise building on a plot that’s less than one acre.
“If you think about a school as the physical embodiment of all the talent, imagination, and possibility of the young people it serves—that is this building!” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement after the opening.
Today, the Josiah Quincy Upper School serves a predominantly minority student population of 650 middle and high school students, marking Boston’s only full-program International Baccalaureate school.
Thus, the new building serves both students and the local community. Toward that end, it has a 435-seat auditorium, a black box theater, gymnasium, and media center. The cafeteria is sited underneath a multi-story atria with a “mural that evokes the rich culture of the surrounding Chinatown neighborhood,” the architects said.
Like its counterpart by TAC, the Josiah Quincy Upper School also fronts the Massachusetts Turnpike. The facade that edges I-90 is mostly made of brick, but its windows have polychromatic casings that recall elevations by TAC, or maybe even Josep Lluís Sert’s buildings at Boston University or Harvard. The building was oriented so that classrooms face north and south for optimal daylighting.
The Upper School’s mascot is a phoenix, and the elementary school’s logo is a dragon. Both a dragon and a phoenix appear in a mural overlooking the cafeteria, exchanging pearls of wisdom “as they dance above the two schools, symbolizing harmony, balance, and prosperity.” A 16,000-square-foot rooftop green space invites students to relax and take in panoramic views of Boston. The landscaped roof is meant to help reduce heat island effect.
So far, the project marks a major milestone for the current city administration. The all-electric Josiah Quincy Upper School is the first school building that opened as part of Boston Public School’s Green New Deal initiative. Heating, cooling, and ventilation are all operated via heat pump technology.
The Josiah Quincy Upper School is on track to received LEED Platinum certification.