13 Stunning Architecture Landmarks in Boston
13 landmarks with verified facts and stories
Back Bay
Boston, United States
Back Bay is Boston's most architecturally cohesive neighbourhood — a grid of Victorian brownstone rowhouses built on filled land in the second half of the 19th century, with wide avenues, tree-lined sidewalks, and Newbury Street running through its centre as the city's premier shopping and dining strip.
Beacon Hill
Boston, United States
Beacon Hill is Boston's most beautiful neighbourhood — a steep hillside of Federal-style brick rowhouses, gas-lit streetlamps, and cobblestone lanes that hasn't fundamentally changed since the early 19th century.
Boston Public Library
700 Boylston St, Boston, MA 02116
The Boston Public Library was the first large free municipal library in the United States when it was founded in 1852, and the main building on Copley Square — a Renaissance Revival palazzo designed by Charles Follen McKim in 1895 — is one of the most beautiful public buildings in America.
Harvard Yard
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138
Harvard Yard is the oldest part of America's oldest university — a walled campus of red-brick buildings, ancient elm trees, and carefully maintained lawns that has been the symbolic heart of American higher education since 1636.
ICA Boston (Institute of Contemporary Art)
25 Harbor Shore Dr, Boston, MA 02210
The ICA is Boston's contemporary art museum and one of the most striking buildings on the waterfront — a glass and steel box designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that cantilevers dramatically over the harbour, creating a covered outdoor space beneath the building and floor-to-ceiling views of the water from the galleries above.
Massachusetts State House
24 Beacon St, Boston, MA 02133
The Massachusetts State House sits at the top of Beacon Hill with a gold dome that has been the most recognisable landmark in Boston since Charles Bulfinch designed it in 1798.
MIT Campus
77 Massachusetts Ave, MIT, Cambridge, 02139, United States
MIT's campus is a walk through 20th and 21st-century architecture that happens to also be one of the world's great engineering universities.
Old North Church
193 Salem St, Boston, MA 02113
Old North Church is where the American Revolution went from talk to action.
Old South Meeting House
310 Washington St, Boston, MA 02108
The Old South Meeting House is where the Boston Tea Party started — not the dumping of tea into the harbour, but the meeting on December 16, 1773, where 5,000 furious colonists packed into this building and debated what to do about three ships full of taxed British tea sitting in the harbour.
Paul Revere House
19 North Square, Boston, MA 02113
The Paul Revere House is the oldest remaining structure in downtown Boston — a wooden house built around 1680, bought by the silversmith and patriot in 1770, and preserved as a museum that gives you a direct, physical connection to the man who rode through the night shouting that the British were coming.
Seaport District
Boston, United States
The Seaport is Boston's newest neighbourhood — transformed over the past two decades from parking lots and surface lots into a dense cluster of glass-and-steel buildings that houses the ICA, dozens of restaurants, and a waterfront promenade that has become one of the city's most popular walking routes.
South End
Boston, United States
The South End contains the largest intact collection of Victorian rowhouses in the United States — block after block of bow-fronted brownstones with stoops, wrought-iron railings, and ornamental cornices that make the neighbourhood one of the most architecturally distinctive in America.
Trinity Church
206 Clarendon St, Back Bay, Boston, 02116, United States
Trinity Church is Henry Hobson Richardson's masterpiece — the building that launched an entire architectural movement (Richardsonian Romanesque) and has been ranked among the ten most significant buildings in American history by the American Institute of Architects.
Explore architecture in Boston
GPS-guided narration at every landmark. Tap a spot on the map, hear the story. Every fact verified.