Mario Torroella: Paintings at City Hall

Cuban-born architect and painter Mario Torroella has lived in Cambridge for a long time. Although he lives around the corner from us (or, more accurately, we live around the corner from him) we only met him in the last year or so. We had no idea how many local buildings we admire that he worked on. For instance, the fire station at the end of Cambridge Street near Lechmere has always caught our eye as striking and a good use of interior supergraphics. We’d walk by and imagine asking the firemen if they knew who designed the building. And then we meet the designer who we swear we’d never seen and we’ve lived, like, six houses from him for the last eighteen years. And we have dinner at his house and he tells us about the Cuban Revolution and the wild generosity of Josep Lluís Sert. And then we find a French design magazine in London which shows interior photos of Sert’s Cambridge house that we walk by all the time (and once tried to get into by offering to “help” the aged occupant with groceries) and Mario and his daughter tell us stories about the house and dinners with the Serts. And we talk about design and he warns us about having seen this fascist movie before. And then there are the paintings. We’d walked by his house before we knew who lived there and we’d spy these paintings and collections through the window. And now we have this poster for a show of his paintings at Boston City Hall in 1973. He was just 38. Boston City Hall was just five years old. Things were getting modern around here and Mario was around to be a part of it.