I like Boston City Hall.
Compare it to 28 State St, right next to it: https://maps.app.goo.gl/jjHpGGuPkxgjXiPT7
28 State St is kinda ugly, but bland and forgettable.
Boston City Hall is so hideous and frightening that people outside of Boston know about it. Its appearance is a recurring topic in the news. That is impressive.
Yeah, if you're going to make it ugly, make it newsworthy ugly. That thing is such an eyesore.
I always think of the building (and brutalist architecture in general) as absurdist architecture, and I find City Hall to be quite humorous in that light.
The general shape lifts up and is trying to appear as if it's floating, in contrast to the material selection. Think of an Elephant ballerina, or Douglas Adams "It hung in the air in exactly the way bricks don't".
Another example is the Holman government building a few blocks away - with these ridiculous stairways through a massive open space underneath an imposing bridge of offices.
Pure absurdist humor.
City Hall is absurd in both it's appearance outside and the impracticality of the design and interior. Rooms with giant concrete columns that cut off sight lines, rampant maintenance problems from elevating form over function , and the comfort of a supratertestrial civil defense shelter.
> It was in this context that the city decided to demolish the neighborhood known as Scollay Square and build in its place what would come to be called Government Center.
Itās interesting (and sad) to imagine what Boston could have been like without the damage of urban renewal. These neighborhoods could have easily become the quaint North Ends people love today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_End,_Boston
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scollay_Square
Itās also eye opening to realize the extent of their plans that didnāt get done:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_695_(Massachusett...
People who opposed demolishing the neighborhoods would be called NIMBYs today and would be blamed for the housing crisis. I'm not saying this to be snarky, just that there is a real push and pull there that I don't think is appreciated. There are some beautiful old neighborhoods near me which are at risk of being torn down and replaced with multi-unit dwellings. The residents say 'save our neighborhoods' and the activists cry 'greedy homeowners' and in the meantime the developers are rubbing their hands in anticipation of mountains of cash.
That particular urban renewal didn't create a lot of new housing. On the other hand, that whole general area of Boston was pretty crappy back in the day. (Not just what's now Government Center but all along Washington Street.) It mostly didn't result in more housing; I'm guessing less. But burying the central artery was almost certainly a lot more positive overall.
According to the West End Museum site, the project created more housing units, but also led to a population decrease, most likely due to the decrease in the number of people living in each unit.
This document is a fascinating read: https://archive.org/details/westendprojectre00bost/page/n79/...
Comparing what they proposed vs what resulted is very interesting.
Oh please. Take a look at the pictures of āredevelopmentā back then and tell me it mirrors modern practices. Weāre talking wholesale bulldozing of entire neighborhoods. Not a block or two, the entire damned thing.
There's a WGBH podcast about the Big Dig and the first episode I think helps you appreciate why some of the interstate connections and routings around Boston are so weird. https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig
Architecturally, the city of Boston has changed many times. You can more or less pinpoint when a building was built by its appearance. City Hall's architecture is mirrored in most of the transit stops from the 1970s-era expansion. Some of them (e.g. Wollaston, Harvard) have since been rebuilt; others (e.g. Quincy Adams, Malden Center) are still concrete behemoths like City Hall.
Anything built within the last ten years is, of course, LEED-chic - the building is a glass box.
Funny thing about the glass box. If you look down Tremont Street towards the bay you used to get a beautifully framed view of Old North Church. The sightline was considered a historical landmark (there's even a plaque for it in front of the Omni Parker House hotel). The Government Center station completely obstructed the view to Old North. Allegedly this is one of the main reasons that Government center is a glass box, it was the only way the construction was approved.
The glass box thing started here too: IM Pei's Hancock tower was one of the first, from the 1970s. And like many architectural wonders, the construction was crap. I can still remember going by and seeing all the boarded-up windows, because the glass kept falling out.
Though none of the Brutalist IM Pei buildings at MIT were as bad, my understanding that they had to retrofit a revolving door in one of them because the wind tunnel effect could make it really hard to open the doors.
https://nowiknow.com/the-curious-problem-with-mits-tallest-b...
And at least there's this there now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_slide
I like brutalist architecture. And I am not the only strange one: r/brutalist has 174K members and the original fuckyeahbrutalism on tumbler.
Think of it like being a fan of 486 PCs or pixel art.
I do hate this architecture, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowellism
I like to think of it like a car wreck: no one actually enjoys looking at one, but you still have to look.
How Boston City Hall was born: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Frankenstein-film-by-Whale
There used to be a neighborhood around it that had architecture similar to what the neighboring North End still has, which is very distinct among the entirety of the Americas. The lack of imagination that existed back then that led to it all being razed to build this and the rest of the garbage of the current West End is stunning.
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