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fuckyeahbrutalism:

City Hall, Boston, Massachusetts, 1962-68

(Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles)

I absolutely love the Boston City Hall. People hate it but it’s probably one of the more beautiful examples of brutalist architecture ever built. It suffers more from the brick wasteland which surrounds it than any design flaws (though heating and cooling are certainly an issue with concrete structures). It’s not traditionally pretty and in architecturally conservative Boston this makes it a target.

One can argue that urban renewal did more harm than good, especially when you erase 1/3 of your downtown for super blocks. But as destructive as it was the ideals of New Boston, at least economically, worked and from the mid 1960s until today Boston has become a leader in new technologies, from computers in the 70s and 80s to biotech today. The transformation of Boston was laid by the same forces that created City Hall and should be acknowledged when people think about this building.

The 1960s was a time when those in power truly thought that monumental architecture could inspire a city to greatness. Looking across the urban renewal landscape, including in Boston itself, we find once optimistic projects having fallen apart, unable to affect the social change they were naïvely meant to address. The architecture itself is often dated and dilapidated as urban design trends left the modernist superblock idea behind generations ago. It is often said that the design was chosen because it represented strength and stability (castle-like is a good description) during the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s.  While grand architecture can surely inspire it cannot change human nature, as displayed by the very famous image of a white man thrusting the US flag into a black man as a weapon taken in front of this very building.

We in this country look forward, not backwards, and find it more acceptable to let the triumphs of the past generation languish while pursuing newer and better things only for the cycle to continue with the next generation.

Luckily Boston City Hall has survived and compared to many other buildings of it’s age, brutalist or not, is in mostly good condition. Many people, even the day it opened, have cried out for its destruction. But being beautiful is not the only point of architecture. The design is one of the few, ever, that succeeded in inspiring a generation to build a better city. Government Center itself is far from perfect and begs to be redeveloped, reknit into a growing city itself helped to create. But Boston City Hall must stay, just as the old City Hall on School St was saved as it too was seen as an eyesore from a previous generation.

My hope is that soon a new generation of people will come of age and see the building as not an eyesore from the past but of a symbol of a different time, one that will join it’s place in history as the city it was built to change grows around it. Historic preservation is about saving the things from the past which helped create the present and acknowledging their worth.  It is somewhat ironic that the movement created to save old buildings from destruction (often by large urban renewal projects like City Hall) must now step up to save the very buildings they once fought. 

I do not mean to say that City Hall is perfect, far from it, but my dream is that soon we will see the beauty in it and do our best to fix the flaws and integrate it into the history of the city.