I was in Boston’s Financial District last Wednesday to attend a board meeting of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, which met not, as usual, at the College Club on Commonwealth – no dearth of photo opportunities around there! – but at the offices on Washington Street of Albert, Righter & Tittmann, the classicist architecture firm whose work shows that creativity and the classical orders needn’t be mutually exclusive. (Indeed, only those who know little of classical architecture think they are.)

Before the meeting I wandered around, almost stumbling into my friend Nathan Walker (see his great post “Architecture and food“) on a trip north with his six students from the College of Charleston, where he teaches. The night before we had met in Providence at the Hot Club, where the young scholars appeared to enjoy hearing my diatribe against modern architecture. Either that or they were polite. Anyway, as I was walking around Faneuil Hall taking photos, I must have missed them by minutes. Shortly after, at ART, I got a call from Nathan suggesting that I meet them at the marketplace. Alas, my meeting – a postmortem of our successful Bulfinch Awards gala – was about to begin. Anyway, here are some of the photos I took beforehand, which amply amplify classicism’s mixture of beauty, order and creativity.