Design Research Building, Cambridge, MA

This past week, Anthropologie opened a new location in Harvard Square, on Brattle St., in the Design Research Building. (The space, on the first floor, was previously a Crate and Barrel.)

The building, above, was designed in 1969 by Ben Thompson, an architect and member of The Architects Collaborative, a Cambridge-based architecture firm notable for including Walter Gropius, who is in turn notable for having founded the Bauhaus, and who came to teach at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design after the Bauhaus shut down under pressure from the Nazis. The Design Research Building is so-called after Thompson’s furniture and housewares store, founded in 1953, which is credited with sparking a revolution in popular taste. In a new book, Alexandra Lange argues that Design Research’s pioneering of modern housewares and furniture paved the way for such stores as, appropriately, Crate and Barrel. Both Lange and a recent Globe article mention the U.S. debut of Marimekko products at DR as one of Thompson’s greatest coups; however, in an article on Fast Company, Lange lists a number of products (some familiar, some not) that Thompson’s store popularized.

[Above: Design Research’s original home, a wooden building on Brattle St. that is no longer with us]

Boston is home to more than a few modernist landmarks—some beloved, some very much not. The idea of recognizing and preserving modernist buildings as landmarks can be controversial. Many find the buildings unremarkable or even ugly, and unworthy of historical landmark designation because of their relative newness. What do you think?