How Boston City Hall was born
bostonglobe.com
bostonglobe.com
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.
I thought your comment was ridiculous at first until I realized that I agree.
I'm reminded of the time I ended up crossing the Empire State Plaza in Albany once in the dead of winter. Such a horrid experience. Surrounded by soulless impersonal concrete with wind and snow blowing and howling. I felt like a freaking ant. It's not the type of architecture that inspires and uplifts in person. It psychologically oppresses and beats down.
Compare that to a place like Saint Peter's, which even as a non-Catholic almost took my breath away to experience in person.
Otherwise known as all architecture. In a past life I work in the entertainment industry: lots of late nights in venues like concert halls and occasional art galleries. All of them contain expensive architectural elements that serve no need other than to stoke the ego of their designers. Look behind the veil and you will see the rat's nest of engineering workarounds needed to keep these white elephants upright. Let the engineers draw a building's outline and it may be ugly, but at least it will have sufficient electrical connections, parking, and floor space.
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.
This opinion puts you in a very small minority, to put it very kindly.
It is a poster child for the dystopian, a cubist insult to anyone who has the misfortune of laying eyes on it. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here".
Statements like this always make me think about how the majority of americans believe that buildings can be haunted by spirits or demons or that ESP or telekinesis are real.
https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2018/10/16/paranormal-am...
I think we need to be honest about the low merit of appealing to how well the average person's brain works.
The building itself is stunning. Look at every ground-level photo of it ever taken that doesn't include the plaza. But the feeling of standing next to the building has always been devastated by the blight of the plaza, and people are mostly incapable of separating the two. It only feels ominous looming conspicuously over a barren wasteland.
This has been quite improved relatively recently by plaza renovation (https://www.sasaki.com/projects/boston-city-hall-plaza-renov...), but that project was only completed at the tail end of 2022 so most people who have capital O "Opinions" about the building have never actually seen it in a less blighted context.
This is the architecture equivalent of blaming software usability problems on the user. If the average person can't use your product or appreciate your building's design, then the design is flawed - end of story.
Agreed on all fronts that City Hall Plaza is a disaster, though. I thought there were plans to revamp it with the Government Center station green line revamp a few years ago, but not sure if that improved anything.
https://www.sasaki.com/projects/boston-city-hall-plaza-renov...
The trend for many new college grads to strongly prefer cities is a relatively recent phenomenon.
My former company opened a relatively large near-downtown office and, while they're keeping a suburban office, it will be much reduced from its earlier main location.
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
It's especially amusing that Boston City Hall is within a stone's throw of the only block that survived the fire of 1872 and throws a shadow over Faneuil Hall.
It’s 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
It’s also eye opening to realize the extent of their plans that didn’t get done:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_695_(Massachusett...
This document is a fascinating read: https://archive.org/details/westendprojectre00bost/page/n79/...
Comparing what they proposed vs what resulted is very interesting.
Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock) grew up in that neighborhood
Europe's eco-brutalist buildings are gorgeous. [1] [2]
Boston City Hall's problem is the windy open plaza. The building stands as the only imposing mass in that area. If there were trees and other shelter, one could admire it. But as it stands today, it intimidates.
All that being said, positives changes are happening. Cop slide is definitely one of Boston's must see attractions.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2024/may/11...
[2] https://www.archdaily.com/958637/uncovering-the-hidden-gems-...
Anything built within the last ten years is, of course, LEED-chic - the building is a glass box.
https://nowiknow.com/the-curious-problem-with-mits-tallest-b...
What do they all have in common? A sense of humanity. Why would we build a civic building that lacks that very thing?
Notre Dame and other great architecture is inspired by great archetypes, it's a well crafted expression of those archetypes to the extent it's possible in stone and concrete. Simply looking at it drags us closer to the ideas behind it.
But not everyone agrees with that direction. There is a large number of people who would rather take humanity in a different direction, and they build this oppressive architecture of bland geometric forms.
There's plenty of brutalist architecture around Boston and Cambridge, though none is as pronounced as city hall, in its massive open square, which in winter keenly acts as a powerful wind tunnel to smite those who would walk through the plaza.
I despise architecture as a field. This is widely reviled building. I work in a similar building that is extremely user hostile but beloved by architects; every single day, multiple times per day, we run into stupid limitations of the building. And it's particularly nasty for people with disabilities.
In engineering we care so much about the end user experience. In everything from building fridges, to roads, to HVAC systems, etc.
That these two people see this as a work of art, instead of a practical thing that humans need to interface with, and that the artistic nature of the building is more important than the people, is incredibly selfish.
Selfish and shameful.
If you want a well-designed building that works for the users, you can find architects to design that. It just won't be as well known because it'll work and do what it needs to do without pissing people off.
As a Boston resident that has had to conduct business at City Hall many times, I couldn't agree with this more. The lower level interior spaces are dark and somehow cavernous and confining at the same time, while the upstairs spaces are more of a warren of rooms and hallways. Nothing about walking in the front door makes you feel welcomed into the space. Either the actual use of the building was totally disregarded in its design, our our standards for how we expect to interact with buildings have dramatically changed since its construction.
There’s no good wood because wood < brick and we cut all of the trees down. So now the cheapest path is pumped concrete, so we build giant reinforced concrete and glass structures that will literally crumble in 70-100 years.
Well.. first start by defining "beautiful", we're waiting. Also, it's a 50 year old structure.. we stopped building "nice" things after WW2 mostly because costs were astronomical and new materials and engineering opened up all kinds of avenues for more modern construction.
I've spent decent amount of time in and around Boston City Hall, the biggest problem with the building are:
1. The plaza in front of it is a damn wasteland. So much could be improved by building over the plaza and reestablishing the street grid here properly.
2. The Congress Street side facing Faneuil Hall is a concrete wall and a garage entrance. You probably can't fix the garage problem easily but the concrete wall with a proper structural engineer could probably reopened up.. of course, it would be expensive.
3. The interior while very interesting architecturally is really quite... I dunno, soul sucking. I kind of love the aesthetic inside but only from a "wow this looks cool" perspective.
2. Agreed regarding the Congress St side, though the added playground from [1] adds some interest to that side (before the solid brick wall part).
3. Agreed with the interior. Something like just changing the flooring or interesting lighting would make it feel less cold. The floor is either brick (I assume an homage to Boston's brick) or terracotta tile. As a very rare visitor inside, it's kinda fun to see how the decor/lighting/infrastructure works with all concrete (hanging things from the ceiling instead of nailing to a wall, for example)
[1] https://www.sasaki.com/projects/boston-city-hall-plaza-renov...
There are nice parks in the area but they're not exactly delightful in the cold weather months either.
There was a feeling that it was time to discard the old and do something different.
Totally agree with this. I enjoy walking through the interior and I like the building overall but I would hate working there.
If the interior offices were kept clean and tidy, I can see how it could be kind of interesting in a retro-futuristic way. But given that these are government offices, they're often full of stacked cardboard boxes of files and other mess that ruins the look. At least the building doesn't have drop ceilings (at least as far as I recall.)
I don’t personally see this a good reason at all.
The US had a good run building neoclassical government buildings in the spitting image of the Romans and Greeks, and we already know that when properly done the aesthetic will stand the test of time for thousands of years.
As far as the improved materials argument that’s up for debate too. Will Boston City Hall be standing in 2,000 years? If I could put money on it I’d say it’s more likely to end up in a landfill.
All this could be prevented with sacrificial applications of stucco, but brutalist architects insist on keeping the concrete bare. It takes a lot of work to keep a building like that from crumbling under these conditions, and city hall is not loved enough to get the work done.
The renovation does help somewhat; I agree with other comments. Rarely down that way any longer. Used to work a few blocks from there.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/No...
https://wmf.imgix.net/images/70_hero_image.jpg?auto=format,c...
Hundreds of years later, most people from completely disparate cultures find these buildings beautiful.
Inside the NBA was held live there recently, Boston Calling (the only largish music festival in the area) started there.
There’s obviously no massive outdoor parking lot in downtown Boston, and it would be a shame to have packed crowds trample over the common.
Most relevant: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/making-architecture-easy/
The big idea is that some art styles are easy to appreciate without training and some aren't, and we probably shouldn't be making public architecture that's hard for members of the public to appreciate. Similarly atonal music isn't objectively bad, I often like it, but I recognize that it isn't appropriate to use in civic functions.
Ironically, the other example of a good building you've provided in this thread, the Taj Mahal, is in fact a monument to narcissism.
Public buildings historically had a religious significance, and architecture as a field was intertwined with religion. The current british parliament building, for example, is built in gothic revival style, which arises from religious architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_Revival_architecture
It was built by people who feared God and wanted to build something lovely in his sight.
I'm not saying Notre-Dame de Paris is a monument to the ego of Pope Alexander III. But the Taj Mahal is not a monument to the glorification of God. You're not going to win this argument.
The new city hall makes people angry and generates comments about totalitarianism, but it offers a range of places to gather inside and out and is extremely easy to navigate with internal spaces that have plenty of light and air. Brutalism may be an unpopular style, but the form itself has quite significant benefits.