A bridge to the future in Brighton

The new WGBH headquarters is like an improbable marriage. A handsome success is wedded to a dowdy loser.

The good-looking spouse is a spectacular piece of architecture. Designed by the Polshek Partnership, of New York, it features a bridge that soars across Guest Street at the corner of Market in Brighton. The bridge then thrusts out above the Mass. Pike, where it ends in a 30-foot-tall illuminated LED mural.

Like a slideshow in the sky, the mural will offer Boston-bound drivers a new image every day. This is the first serious example in Boston of a kind of architecture we're beginning to see elsewhere, in Times Square, for example, in which the architectural façade of a building is no longer made of the traditional brick, stone, steel or glass but is, instead, an ever-changing, programmable image.

Call it digital architecture. Architecture and media become one. It's a horrifying prospect for the future of human life. Who wants to live in a city that's been designed as an outdoor multiplex screening room?

That nightmare, though, is in the future, and for now, here at WGBH, digital architecture looks pretty good. The station says images will be modest, and Boston city planners promise us that LED murals won't pop up everywhere. You can judge for yourself when the WGBH mural lights up tomorrow for the first time.

The mural is only the highlight of an impressive new building. The problem, alas, is that this new building is joined to a turkey.

Most of the station's employees are shoe-horned into an older building known as 10 Guest St., a structure that is of no architectural distinction indoors or out.

WGBH bought part of 10 Guest, built its new building across the street, and connected new and old with the bridge, which spans the street. The bridge is like a yoke that pairs a fresh colt, full of life and spirit, with a tired draft horse.

The bridge itself is great. Much more than merely a bridge, it's the dominant feature of the whole complex. It's 50 feet wide and two stories tall, sheathed with glass, filled with offices and meeting rooms. It's bold, fresh, memorable architecture, and it creates for the station a kind of architectural logo. It also begins to give shape to a neighborhood - once the city's stockyards - that's otherwise forgettable.

As for No. 10, by contrast, employees call it "corporate." The office layouts are tightly spaced, grid-like and repetitive, and the colors are white and gray. One place looks pretty much like another. It's hard for a department to feel any sense of identity with its own turf. The Polshek firm was the architect for this renovation, too, perhaps uninspired by the drab existing building.

Windows are plentiful, but they're located on public corridors that run along the outside edge of each floor. The idea here was to be democratic: No office would boast a private window. All windows would be shared. The concept works all right where employees occupy a pool of cubicles, because light flows over the low partitions. But when partitions are full height, things begin to feel dark and cramped. In neither case is there anything like the inventive, open, colorful, free-form life of other recent office space in Boston.

The best you can say about 10 Guest is that it's no worse than the rat mazes WGBH used to occupy in 12 separate buildings on Western Avenue - although even those, with the orneriness of human character, are now remembered fondly by some for their informality.

Back to the good news, though, which is the fine new building with its bridge. The architects, the Polshek Partnership, are perhaps best known for the Clinton presidential library in Arkansas and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History, in New York.

I like almost everything about the new building. The architecture is unfussy, crisp, modern, perhaps slightly factory-like in appearance. A key player in determining that was Chris Pullman, a nationally respected graphic designer whose title at WGBH is the slightly "1984"-ish "vice president for branding and communication."

Pullman likes the unpretentious factory look. "We manufacture content," he says. WGBH produces, in fact, about one-third of all prime-time national broadcasting on PBS. Pullman's aesthetic is dry but it isn't cold, although he did seem a bit uptight on a recent visit, when he was annoyed by a pile of balloons someone had placed near the entrance.

The new performance spaces and other facilities look handsome and generous to this non-specialist. (For some reason, radio and recording studios - everywhere, not just at 'GBH - always seem to be black. Since no listener sees them, why is this?) There's an obvious effort to welcome the public. You can look into some of the studio interiors, at least at night, from the adjoining Market Street sidewalk. (Planners at the Boston Redevelopment Authority pushed for this kind of transparency.) The main arrival lobby is big enough for parties, fund-raisers, and other public events. A 210-seat theater is an elegant gem, to be used for public screenings and other purposes.

Like most new buildings in Boston, WBGH is "green" in the sense that it expects to attain a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, albeit the lowest level. Much of the building is built with recycled materials. There are solar panels on one flat roof, and another is to be covered with grass. Total construction cost, including equipment, for the new building and the renovation of the old came to about $85 million, or about $250 per square foot. Things weren't helped by the business collapse of the original contractor, which one participant estimates cost $6 million. But construction prices have risen so fast in the last two or three years that, already, WGBH looks like a bargain.

The biggest nod to the public, of course, is the mural. Pullman will be the one programming it. Most of the images, he says, will come from the station's vast archive. WGBH negotiated with the city to get permission for the mural, and the result is an agreed set of rules. Nothing is to be commercial or promotional. There will be mostly pictures, with few words. Images will be static or slowly moving. There will be "no third party messages, no calls to action." WGBH says the mural will only function at peak turnpike traffic hours, which seems a pity.

Some early critics complained that the mural would be a dangerous distraction to drivers. More likely, it will be a mild relief from the boredom of motoring the turnpike. It will be fun to see how the station decides to use it. Maybe Julia Child at Thanksgiving?

Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.