Blog Post No. 2012-4: More about Boston City Hall and the meaning of civic architecture

RTUF Nation knows that we've blogged more than once about Government Center, City Hall Plaza and the edifice that is Boston City Hall here at the little blog that could. Mostly, we've talked about how gainfully using the windswept plaza that replaced tightly-knit though unquestionably seedy Scollay Square has been a problem that the city has grappled with since the day the last brick in the plaza was put down. And now, even as the decades-long effort has taken on new and different forms and finally begins to show some promise, we have yet another defense of Boston City Hall itself, the heart of the problem or the solution, depending on your perspective. This time it's Leon Neyfakh in, where else, The Boston Globe, writing about the building's genesis 50 years ago: How Boston City Hall Was Born. The basic argument in the piece is that the 1962 design competition for the new building and its subsequent construction was, at some level, the precipitating event that announced the New Boston and signaled the end of the old:

Whatever else you might think about it, Boston City Hall is an improbable building. Call it a giant concrete harmonica or a bold architectural achievement, but to walk by this strange, asymmetrical structure in Government Center is to wonder how on earth it landed there.



Boston City Hall has come in for significant criticism over the years. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has proposed selling it and investing in a more conventional headquarters. But the truly remarkable fact is that it was built in the first place. Experimental architecture, after all, is something we expect from museums and universities, not municipal governments. Take a look at other cities — Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles — and you’ll find city halls adorned with columns and arches, domes and porticos. Some are made of marble. Some have giant clocks. Then there’s ours, which looks like a fossilized spaceship.


Yet it wasn’t aliens who brought it here. Surprisingly, it was a group of Boston politicians and businessmen, along with two young architects named Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, who conceived of the building as a dramatic gesture intended to help usher in a new era in Boston history. This year marks the 50th anniversary of a decisive moment in that campaign: namely, an unusual design competition mounted by Mayor John F. Collins, in which architects were invited to imagine a brand-new, forward-looking home for Boston’s city government.


Boston was a very different place then. Until the 1950s, it had been a city “dying on the vine,” as US News & World Report put it, and the situation had improved only marginally when Collins took office in 1960. Economically stagnant, notoriously in thrall to political corruption, the city had seen little development for decades. As business owners decamped and residents fled to the suburbs, a fear took hold that Boston would soon be hollowed out for good.


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. Forceful and bewildering, Kallmann and McKinnell’s Boston City Hall would be the centerpiece of this controversial plan to revitalize Boston’s economy and convince its citizens — and the world — that the city was changing.


When the winning design was unveiled in the spring of 1962, “It sent a signal that the city was taking itself seriously,” said Keith Morgan, an architectural historian at Boston University. “That the city wanted to be something better than it had been.”

In other words, Boston was on a losing streak and needed to get its mojo back, and the new City Hall was just the object building needed to make it happen. Let's test that theory out a bit, shall we?

Virtually every city in the Northeast and the Rust Belt had to endure the same anti-urban orgy of disinvestment and victim-blaming in the first quarter century after the Second World War. So, in a sense, all of those places were in the same fix, trying to show that they were still viable or, at the very least, weren't going to go down without a fight. There was a need for a new New York, a new Philadelphia and a new Baltimore as much as there was for a New Boston.

Clearly, some cities did better than others in reinventing themselves, and Boston has to stand as one of the great urban success stories of the second half of the 20th century. Neyfakh's article would have us believe that this is due, perhaps principally, to the message sent out by the City Hall design competition and the design jury's politics-free selection of the design proposed by Kallman, McKinnell, and Knowles. The city was demonstrably leaving its past behind and striking out in a different direction. While one can't deny that City Hall and Government Center in general are radical departures from what had been the norm and had to have had a kind of "Did Boston really do that?" effect, we might want to consider instead the city's built-in advantages in the post-industrial American economy, especially the role played by its world class universities and hospitals, which ensured that it would play a major role in the high-tech and bio-tech booms of the last forty years. So, put me in the camp of not being convinced that coincidence is causality in this case. If the region's central core didn't have the Mass General, the Longwood Medical Area institutions, Harvard, and MIT, and all of the supporting institutions and infrastructure in between, I'm not sure that clearing the downtrodden heart of the city and building a modernist monument would have really made much difference. Similarly, I don't know that a renovated, instead of annihilated Scollay Square couldn't have been the heart of the New Boston in much the same way that Times Square is now the restored heart of New York, even though it has much the same physical layout and feel as it did 50 years ago. So, maybe the question is, did Boston really have to tear down some its best, while admittedly ragged, urban fabric and replace it with a buidling that is clearly more interesting as a piece of sculpture and a disastrously failed plaza in order to show that it "wanted to be something better than it had been." Dramatic, yes. Wise? Not so much.

Maybe, in defense of the City's public officials who had to deal with the world as it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not as we wish it might have been from a vantage point 50 years down the road, there wasn't any other way to make an architectural statement than to go for full-throttle modernist brutalism and hire Le Corbusier disciples. I get that. But it doesn't change the sub-optimal urban fabric that we still have on our hands and it also doesn't change the tragically apt observation of Ada Louise Huxtable, cited in Neyfakh's article, regarding "the architectural gap, or abyss, as it exists between those who design and those who use the 20th century’s buildings." However the building came to be and whatever its intention may have been, there remains a massive difference of opinion and considered judgment about Boston City Hall between most of us here in the real world, and the insular world of architectural crticism. To the former group, the building remains an inefficient and alienating place that we sometimes have to enter when we deal with the City. Rather than admit the building's many manifest faults, the latter group continues to defend even its worst features and the unwelcoming urban environment that results as simply something that the rest of us just don't understand. Fifty years on, you can't argue that this is a knee-jerk reaction in the heat of the moment or that the general public is simply resistant to change in whatever form, regardless how beneficial. If you can't get people to love your building 50 years after it was built, maybe there really is something amiss with what you designed, no matter how monumental.

Blog Post No. 2010-3: A Response and a Concern

Or, by Their Fruits Shall You Know Them (Urban Design-wise, That Is...)

Last month, the Boston Globe ran two stories on the metropolitan region's mid-20th Century legacy of large-scale concrete buildings. The first was a Sunday Arts & Entertainment section piece on January 3 by Robert Campbell entitled "The beauty of concrete." The second, by Sarah Schweitzer, appeared on January 24 in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine under the headline of "In Praise of Ugly Buildings." Both articles have a kind of "man-bites-dog" quality to them. (I mean, who thinks concrete buildings are beautiful, or that ugly buildings deserve praise?) Indeed, both articles posit that, despite the generally negative view that most people have of Boston's mid-20th Century concrete buildings, given their age, their relative level of endangerment, and the advent of new, relatively young cheerleaders for these buildings, the time has come to reconsider their place in the area's architectural heritage and even accept them as and for what they are. I've been pondering whether and how best to respond. Here goes:

Before getting underway, I'd like to stipulate that I'm going to cherry pick a bit by focusing on the two least-liked buildings in the bunch -- Boston City Hall at Government Center and the State Services Center on the superblock bounded by Staniford, Merrimack, New Chardon, and Cambridge Streets (both in the brutalist style) -- but I believe the argument I lay out here holds for other modernist buildings as well.

First of all, it is essential to understand the historical background for these two buildings to really understand what it means to defend them today and state, as is done in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine article, that "past sins must be forgiven and...the buildings...recognized for thier own history -- that of ushering Boston into the 20th century." The reference to "past sins" is a slight and somewhat opaque nod to the urban renewal-era origins of these buildings: both the State Services Center and Boston City Hall are part of the larger Government Center Urban Renewal Area that condemned and razed Scollay Square in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Scollay Square was, at the time, much past its prime and serving as the city's main red light district. In other words, a rather inviting target for urban renewal, at a time when the urban renewal movement was at its height and wrecking balls were swinging in many places. The most notorious urban renewal project was in the West End, where the entire neighborhood was leveled to make way for Le Corbusier-style towers in the park.

Before and After: The first photo is the pre-demolition West End in the 1950s. The second photo is the West End as it appeared in 1960.

All of this destruction and reconstruction, so the story goes, was a critical sign of the birth of the "New Boston" as the city shrugged off its decrepit, overly conservative past and reached out for a new and brighter future at mid-century. Suffice it to say, not everyone agrees with that narrative.

Fast forward to 2006, when Boston Mayor Thomas Menino first raised the possibility of moving city hall to the redeveloping South Boston Waterfront and selling off (read: demolishing) the existing Boston City Hall for private redevelopment to fund the move. The cratering of the commercial real estate market has put that initiative on hold, but the Mayor's mere suggestion was enough to galvanize the previously marginalized supporters of the city's concrete legacy. Thus, Ms. Schweitzer's article quotes extensively from a recent reappraisal from the Boston Landmarks Commission of the architectural value of several of Boston's major modernist concrete buildings, including not only Boston City Hall and the State Services Center but the JFK Federal Building (also at Government Center), 133 Federal Street (which was targeted a couple of years ago for a new ultra-high rise), and the St. Anthony Shrine on Arch Street as well. It appears, based on the article's quotations from the study, that the BLC may be considering landmarking some or all of these buildings. They are said to be "architectural treasures" that have been affected over the years by the public's "widespread lack of understanding, appreciation, and context for buildings of this period." Those presumably really in the know -- the president of the New England chapter of DOCODOMO (an international organization based in Barcelona and devoted to the preservation of modernist architecture), two architects who co-curated an exhibit on Boston's mid-20th century buildings at the pinkcomma gallery in the South End, and a professor of architecture at Boston University -- are then quoted by Ms. Schweizer asserting that "[t]o just say they are ugly is a cop-out" and declaring them "large-scale works of public sculpture."

Sorry, but saying these buildings are ugly is not a cop-out, it's merely stating the truth. And to call them "large-scale works of public sculpture" is the most revealing statement made in either article. It is a peculiarly modernist idea that buildings should be conceived principally as massive art installations as opposed to, say, parts of the city's urban fabric. This orientation largely explains why modernist buildings such as these are almost uniformly unsuccessful when built in urban settings. They are generally intended to be viewed in isolation as art objects, even if they aren't actually so located and even, unlike, say a Jackson Pollock painting, where people are forced to do more than just look at them in a gallery, but actually have to live, work with, and pass by them on a regular basis. As they say in the computer programming world, the fact that these buildings look out of place is a feature, not a bug.

So, like most of the general public, I do not like either the State Services Center or Boston City Hall. All of the foregoing said, though, I am not terribly interested in their specific architectural stylings, how ugly they are, or even how they look on the skyline. Rather, my main concern is how they interact at ground level with people, adjacent streets, and their surrounding built environment.

"By their [urban design] fruits shall you know them."

Viewed through this lens, we have got some bad fruit, people. The State Services Center and Boston City Hall represent acutely impaired parts of the urban fabric that cry out for substantial improvement. To demonstrate what I mean, herewith photos showing both buildings from angles that were not shown in the Globe articles:

First, two photos from the Congress Street frontage of Boston City Hall, the first showing the massive bunker-like brick wall that turns a complete blind face to the street and Dock Square, the Samuel Adams statue, and Faneuil Hall across the way, and the second showing the blocked-off stairway shown in side view in the first photo. The third photo is of the side of the building that faces across the narrow part of City Hall Plaza toward the low-rise portion of the JFK Federal Building.

In order, a section of the Merrimack Street frontage, the pulled-back corner at Merrimack and Staniford Street (fenced off and occupied by parked cars), and the completely door-less facade on Cambridge Street.

This is where the prospect of the BLC possibly landmarking these buildings goes from merely interesting to take on aspects of potentially genuine tragedy. From an urban fabric/urban design standpoint, it is hard to find two more hostile, more badly-behaved buildings in Boston. They are in desperate need of serious, thorough intervention that will open their dull, alienating frontages up to the life of the street and the city they, for better or worse, inhabit. Before the BLC landmarks these buildings, consideration needs to be given to how much more difficult their badly-needed retrofit will become after that occurs.

Ultimately, then, by all means, argue the relative merits of these buildings, their styles and their place in the architectural history of the city. And maintain, preserve, and even systematically improve these buildings' performance. From a sustainability perspective, their replacement would require much more energy than their revitalization -- arguing strongly for leaving them where they are. But let's be careful before we unintentionally saddle ourselves with obviously dead streetscapes and torn urban fabric for too many more generations.

[RTUF Note: This entry has been revised since its original posting.]

Blog Post No. 2009-8: The W Hotel Boston (100 Stuart Street)

And now for something completely different...

Location: 100 Stuart Street, Boston, MA (MAP)

Year of Urban Fabric Restoration: 2009

The Photos: Walking along Stuart Street, from the corner at Tremont Street toward Charles Street.

The Story: Finally completed and opened just a couple of months ago, the W Hotel Boston substantially changes the dynamic at the corner of Tremont and Stuart streets in the heart of Boston's theater district. The Charles Playhouse is down Warrenton Street, the Wang and Wilbur theaters are across Tremont Street, the Shubert's right next door, the Emerson Majestic is a block up Tremont, and the Colonial is up and around the corner on Boylston Street. Most recently, art house cinema returned to Boston at the Stuart Street Playhouse two blocks over. Despite its central location, for at least as long as I've lived in Boston (since 1997), this site was the archetypal urban fabric no-no: a surface parking lot occupying a full city block at a key downtown intersection.

The architecture here is uncompromisingly modernist in style, though the building's placement on its site suggests its designers were more than happy to come out and meet the street directly with lots of ground floor activity and transparency. Of course, this is a fairly tight urban site with no space to waste anyway. While the building is a clear departure from much of what's around it, there has been little open hostility to its ultimate arrival, especially given its overall height and facades that proceed directly to the buidling's full height without any stepping back.

This may be a good point at which to discuss Boston's "High Spine." As with so many things having to do with architecture, urban design, and planning in Boston, Robert Campbell recently (in 2006) covered this topic in the Boston Globe (link here) elegantly and with an eye toward what is truly important about it, especially its accordance with Boston's "basic DNA" as a craggy peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow neck, even if the original Boston Neck was a bit more to the south and east. Here let it be said that the High Spine has, since its endorsement in 1961 by the Boston Society of Architets' Committee on Civic Design, provided a remarkably durable and understandable conceptual framework for where tall buildings outside of the city's Financial District should be located. That is, in a "High Spine" stretching from the area around Kenmore Square on the west, running eastward on a line through the Prudential Center, Copley Square, and Park Plaza (thereby threading the needle between the Back Bay and the South End atop the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension, the MBTA Orange and Green lines, and the main Amtrak/Commuter Rail corridor). Major and easily recognizable peaks on the High Spine today include the Prudential building itself and the "old" (the one with the weather beacon on top) and "new" (designd by I.M. Pei) Hancock towers, but there are many less lofty peaks along the length of the spine, including the Millennium Center development from earlier this decade and, now, the W Hotel. It may well be that the location of this new building along the High Spine explains why, at least at this point (several years after its approvals were obtained), its realization has caused little angst among the populace. All in all, it's a welcome addition to the urban ensemble.

RTUF Sketch of the Restored Urban Fabric: I'm pretty sure that the dimesions on the building's notch along the Tremont Street side are not accurate, but you get the general idea.