Boston Mapparium Globe | Story Behind The Place

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The World That Stayed in 1935

Between Copley Square and Fenway Park, at the western edge of Boston’s Back Bay, stands the Christian Science Publishing House.

When the Christian Science Publishing Society began planning the building in the early 1930s, the New York Daily News had already made a giant spinning globe the centerpiece of its lobby. That globe gave Boston architect Chester Lindsay Churchill another idea. Instead of building a world visitors would walk around, he would build one they could walk through.

The result was the Mapparium™ globe: a thirty-foot sphere made from 608 panels of stained glass, crossed through its center by a glass bridge.

The glass bridge crosses the equator at the center of the thirty-foot Mapparium globe inside Boston’s Christian Science Publishing House. From the bridge, visitors see the world from the inside, surrounded by 608 stained-glass panels.

The globe opened in 1935 as a display of the international reach of The Christian Science Monitor. It was meant to show the world as it currently stood—and to be updated as borders shifted.

No update was ever made.

Instead, the glass map became a time capsule its builders never intended to make.

Built in 1935. Still shows 1935.

A glass inscription inside the Mapparium globe in Boston credits Chester Lindsay Churchill as its designer. It explains his unusual premise: placing the map on the inner surface of a sphere so the world could be examined in its geographic relationship.

Updating the Mapparium globe would not have been like revising a printed map. The original had taken nearly three years to build. Each panel was individually shaped, painted with powdered color, fired, and fitted into a bronze framework. Three hundred bulbs illuminated the glass from outside the sphere.

The first update was considered only four years after the globe opened. By 1939, the world was changing so rapidly that any new map might soon be outdated itself. The Publishing Society decided to wait.

The question arose again in the 1950s, but no update was made. By 1966, the globe had already outlasted World War II, the creation of the United Nations, the retreat of colonial empires, and the arrival of dozens of new countries.

By then, the reasoning had changed. The globe was thirty-one years old, and replacing its glass panels was estimated to cost $175,000. The Publishing Society decided that it had greater value as a work of art than as an up-to-date map.

The idea of updating it was dropped.

Then the changes kept coming. Humans walked on the Moon. Germany reunited. The Soviet Union disappeared.

This section of the Mapparium globe curves from Europe into the Middle East, with countries, territories, and mandates labeled as they were in 1935. The glass has not changed since. The world around it has.

None of it altered a single pane of glass in Boston.

The globe was built to show the world as it was.

It still does—just not the world its builders intended.

And that is the story behind the place.

Visitor note: The Mapparium globe is open to visitors as part of the How Do You See the World?™ experience at Christian Science Plaza in Boston.