![]() What McLaughlin’s design lacked in formal grandeur, it made up for in what Goldberger describes as its “benign quirkiness”: the ad hoc arrangement of its grandstands, its famously shallow left field. Nolan, a reporter at The Boston Globe, later described the home of the Red Sox as “a crazy-quilt violation of city planning principles” and “an irregular pile of architecture.” These were meant as compliments. “If he knew of Frank Lloyd Wright and other modernist architects who were beginning to challenge traditional ways of designing buildings,” Goldberger writes, “he probably did not agree with them.” The project this unadventurous soul undertook would be known as Fenway Park. As Paul Goldberger allows in BALLPARK: Baseball in the American City (Knopf, $35), “most of the best ballparks have not, in fact, been particularly memorable pieces of architecture by any formal standard.” In 1911, when the 37-year-old James McLaughlin was commissioned to design one, he had never worked on such a structure before, and never would again. ![]()
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