Worcester's Beauty Is On The Inside

A look around Worcester’s budding architectural style would make you believe you’re in a Midwestern city.

City Square, Mechanics Tower, the old Flagship Bank which is now People’s United Bank, as well as the new Unum building going up, all have a solid, clean look, but don’t have much going on in the way of creative styling or ornamentation. From the outside, the same could be said of the Hanover Theater or the old Thom McCan Building on Millbrook Street, which is now called the Worcester Business Center.

These buildings stand in stark contrast to the truly riveting beauty of Union Station and City Hall, especially the staircase in front of City Hall, which resembles a pair of welcoming arms. The 70’s glass Shawmut Tower, now Sovereign Tower, is also a stylish thing of beauty due to the reflecting glass that it utilized. Some of Massachusetts College Pharmacy and Health Science buildings retain enough of their old buildings history to breathe some life into their modern exteriors.

The new buildings at UMass are this same modern, non-discript architectural style. An interesting upgrade from this corporate-clean style is the same kind of building structures, but built with brick, as was used in the new courthouse on Main Street, some of the Gateway Park buildings, the new state mental health hospital, and the science building at Worcester State University.

Yet none of these buildings compare on the outside to the older buildings they replaced, such as the old Worcester State Hospital or the old Courthouse further down on Main Street at Lincoln Square.

It’s the interiors, however, of some of the new or renovated buildings that are breathtakingly beautiful. The interior of Union Station is the most beautiful interior space in Worcester, the new Courthouse on Main Street’s interior shows the astounding aesthetic beauty of wasted space, looking like a place where the ancient pharos of Egypt could be approached or even buried in a modern day pyramid. Hanover Theater’s interior is so exquisitely tasteful as to be enchanting, as is Tuckerman Hall on a smaller, quieter scale.

Perhaps Worcester has reverted to pre-Gothic, Christian Romanesque-style thinking, which tried to make a statement about human existence through its architectural choices: in their case with small, yet overwhelmingly vast, mosaic depictions of old and new testament scenes completely covering the interior of churches – like at St. Mark’s in Venice, Raveena and Sicily, Italy;

Saying through their buildings: that true, meaningful and enduring beauty is on the inside.

As we further build and develop Worcester’s new buildings, let’s not forget that we should reflect that we are a 290 year old place of continuous development, not that we began our existence this decade.