Quincy is home to a pretty good collection of mid mod architecture, I have noticed.

To start with, the Bank of America building at Broadway and 24th and the other Blessing Hospital building at Broadway and 14th, and the old First Bankers Trust building, with its rust-red brick and massive brass trellis with the inscribed circles. Unfortunately, that is near complete total demolition.

There’s an entire neighborhood of Mid Mod homes roughly between State and Maine off of 24th to 30th streets.

Holowicki

Mid Mod is short for Mid-Century Modern architecture. It was made famous in the fifties and sixties by the likes of architects Eero Saarinen, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Minoru Yamasaki, who inspired some of the most prolific Danish Architecture styles of that period.

The World Trade Center designed by Yamasaki was one such example.

Earlier on in the late forties, Dutch Modern and mid mod furniture had evolved from the Deco Revival or Streamlined Moderne styles that were iconic of the late forties and very early fifties, the Zoe theater in Pittsfield being one such example.

This was an era when Frankie Laine, Mitch Miller, and Rosemary Clooney rules the airwaves. There weren’t more than a few thousand TV’s in homes yet.

As the decade proceeded, industrial designers and furniture designers used geometrical shapes and fused the streamlined design to create the Moderne style. Such examples included Arne Jacobsen’s Egg Chair and Howard Miller’s Ballclock. Herman Miller experimented with molded fiberglass to create a variety of shapes in home furnishings, following the trend.

Architects designed office buildings, houses, couches and coffee makers interchangeably.

By the seventies, mid mod,-not a nickname coined until much recently, was a mainstream style that was still fairly strong but waning as the newer modern style of tinted cylindrical buildings and boxey styles took over as the more preferred, simpler forms.

Today, as the “fifty years old” mandate for being officially recognized as historic by the National Trust for Historic Preservation comes into full swing, many architects and historians have been moving quickly to write nominations and tax credits to spare these buildings.

Yet, for the past twenty years, modern architects and corporate decision makers viewed these structures as ugly, as they were demolished in huge numbers. They are not. They are testament to a time when women wore pillbox hats and stylish, conical and cylindrical ashtrays were commonplace at the local bank or Triple-A office. There were no earth tones, or pseudo neoclassic styles. Lime Green and turquoise were en vogue as was blonde, tapered brassed-capped legged furniture.

Today in 2011, as the 50-year mark passes mid mod structures become eligible to be placed on the National Register, Quincy should be celebrating the abundance of Mid Century Modern architecture in addition to it’s vast collection of Italiante and Queen Anne homes throughout the city. Feel free to buy a book about Mies van der Rohe or Mid Century Modern architecture and celebrate it. Better yet, drive around Quincy and see if you can spot a Mid Mod. Maybe your mother or grandmother has a cool kitchen table and chairs from the fifties!

Steve Holowicki