21 | Christian Science Plaza — Still Water Under a Long Colonnade

The production needed a piece of Boston that could pass for an institution grander than any single campus building, and it found one at the corner of Massachusetts and Huntington Avenues. The Christian Science Center gave the film its wide, cool, symmetrical exteriors: the domed Mother Church of 1894, the twenty-eight-story administration tower, and I. M. Pei's plaza, finished in 1973, running the whole block.

The reflecting pool is the reason to come. It is 686 feet long and holds the tower, the dome and the sky in one flat sheet of water, and on a hot afternoon children run the edge of it while office workers eat lunch on the granite lip. The scale is deliberate — Pei wanted a space where the buildings would be seen from a distance rather than crowded — and it makes anyone crossing it look small and purposeful at the same time, which is exactly the register the film wants for a student walking into a life he has not thought through.

Stand at the south end near the fountain, with the tower behind you. The city noise drops away by several decibels. That silence is the shot.