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Benjamin Thompson Dies in Cambridge, Mass.

Architect created Faneuil Hall and South Street Seaport urban marketplaces

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Benjamin Thompson, the architect who created the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, died Saturday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 84.

Thompson went on to repeat the Faneuil Hall Marketplace formula at the South Street Seaport in New York, Harborplace in Baltimore and Union Station in Washington.

Quincy Market, the first phase of the Faneuil Hall project, opened in 1976. Dedicated, in Thompson's words, to “the sight and smell of food, the cornerstone of human commerce,” the 150-year-old, 550-foot-long market hall was filled with restaurants and specialty shops where one could buy fresh herbs, raw oysters, coffee beans and Chinese cooking supplies.

“Shopping was the excuse, the stated activity,” architect David Rockwell said about Thompson's work. “He was able to combine getting developers interested in cities and bringing people together as a way to celebrate the pleasure inherent in public spaces.”

In the 1970s, it was considered a radical notion that a dilapidated, moribund inner-city locale could be remade as a vibrant, popular, round-the-clock gathering place. “It was an extraordinary celebration of design, life, urbanism and all the things we tend to take for granted now,” said architect Moshe Safdie. “He was one of the forces that changed America in that respect.”

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Thompson was born in St. Paul, Minn., graduated from Yale University in 1941, and then served in the Navy. After World War II, he and six colleagues founded TAC, the Architects Collaborative, in Cambridge. They were joined by Walter Gropius, a leading figure at the Bauhaus, whom Thompson succeeded in 1963 as chairman of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

During this period, Thompson started a business called Design Research, which specialized in the design of accessory products. His five-story, all-glass showcase for Design Research opened in Cambridge in 1970. Architectural Record said the transparent structure “points the way to a method of glass building that couldcreate a warmer city, adding color and light and optimism to the life of the streets.”

After 20 years at TAC, Thompson founded Benjamin Thompson and Associates. But he lost control of Design Research soon thereafter. The Cambridge building now houses a Crate & Barrel store.

Thompson's national reputation was earned in a series of waterfront projects with the developer James Rouse, beginning with Faneuil Hall and including — in addition to the Harborplace of 1980 and South Street Seaport of 1985 — the Bayside Marketplace in Miami and Jacksonville Landing in Jacksonville, Fla., both of 1987.

Although the festival marketplace formula is now criticized in some circles for replacing diversity with homogeneity, and for eroding the distinction between urban and suburban, public and private, it was conceived as the answer to the serious shortcomings of urban renewal by bulldozer. When Quincy Market opened in 1976, Thompson said, “The problems of the cities, how to create a new city center in practically every city in the country, is the greatest issue facing the country today.”

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