Its truly hideous. Old City Hall is beautiful. Why can't we build nice things anymore?
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.
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.
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.
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.