Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/619377
Right: A sketch by Ms. Cella of the Broadway T station, a glass block shelter built at a Lynn commuter train station based on the design of the actual Broadway station, which no longer had the dilapidated feel of Southie in the 1980s. Below, top to bottom: Working drawings for the Broadway train station, drawn by Assistant Art Director Sarah Contant. A SketchUp model of the station with sign and map by Geoffrey Mandel, rendered in IRender nXt. The Broadway T station under construction. Government Center, but had an uninteresting interior. The investigators had individual offices, and there was no way to play the script in an office like that. Here we took the liberty to adapt reality to make the story better. Boston has spectacular examples of 1970s brutalist architecture. The most notable, and also the most hated, is Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles Boston City Hall, a monument to brutalismo. The building was used as the exterior and interior hallway for the film's FBI offices. I used the concrete of the federal building to contrast with South Boston. The pristine and clean interior of the FBI, cold cement and blue tones, play against the warm wood and flowering textured wallpapers of the homes in Southie. That contrast was important to me. Hard and cold surfaces in contrast with warm and soft ones. That look glued the entire design together. A location was found with a long, sweeping curved wall of glass which looked out over the financial district. The formality of the individual offices was eliminated in favor of a space with a center for meetings and discussions. The singular spaces of private offices were put behind glass partitions, so the depth of field and texture were always present. A private conversation could happen while a nearby group of agents could be working undisturbed on something else, and Boston can be always seen in the background, outside the windows, even in offices that are one hundred feet away, because of the glass layers that isolate the sound but not the light and the images. The lighting system was designed for different looks: morning light from the long windows, rows of fluorescent fixtures behind grids above, pools of light on top of the desks, and desk lights for night and more moody scenes. The FBI office has Boston on the wall as well. It was usual for police and federal offices to have maps of the city with circled and defined neighborhoods where criminal gangs were active.