3 ms·
Boston City Hall is quite possibly the ugliest building I've ever seen. The soot-belching, ash-caked, grease-grimed, wood-burning power plant that I worked in
by douche 11y ago
Boston City Hall is quite possibly the ugliest building I've ever seen. The soot-belching, ash-caked, grease-grimed, wood-burning power plant that I worked in summers in college was more beautiful.
- Analemma_ 11y agoIt really is hideous. I grew up in the Boston area, and even as a little kid I distinctly remember thinking, "This has got to be the ugliest building in the world". Then when I got older I thought, "Well, the world is a big place and I haven't seen much of it, so I don't have much of a frame of reference. I'm sure there are uglier buildings somewhere." And then when I got a little older still, it was kind of satisfying to see multiple articles and polls saying that no, it is indeed one of the ugliest buildings in the entire world. It's not even that I think Brutalism is inherently bad. I think there are some really nice examples, like the AT&T building in NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:AT%26T_Long_Lines_building.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:A.... But Boston City Hall is Brutalism at its absolute worst.
- ghaff 11y agoI once read a humorous column that described it as an attempt to give any visiting Soviets an inferiority complex by out Soviet-ing Soviet architecture. There are some decent brutalist buildings on the MIT campus including the MIT Student Center--which has a lot of interesting funky angles and is a rather useful space--and a number of IM Pei buildings (at least I think the latter are considered brutalist). There's also the Christian Science Plaza that I'd go so far as to call quite attractive.