4 ms·

That's funny, in the context of American buildings, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Greek columns in Georgian mansions. Only after that do I

That's funny, in the context of American buildings, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Greek columns in Georgian mansions. Only after that do I think of perhaps courthouses. Here in Boston, the brutalist monstrosity that is our city hall has its Soviet oppressiveness enhanced by the pillbox-laden concrete wasteland that surrounds it. It really is a monument to government power.

ghaff 10y ago
Boston City Hall really is an epic attempt to outdo Soviet era totalitarian architecture. There is at least some effort to do something with the windswept brickyard that surrounds it. [1] I haven't followed these plans all that closely but, to the degree the surrounding space can be made more useful/inviting, it would help a lot. I'd also note that the brutalist addition to the Boston Public Library always struck me as rather a desecration of the original Beaux Arts structure but the recent remodel and cleanup actually created a rather open and airy space. I still don't love the architecture but it's a big improvement. [1] https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/boston-city-hall-plaza-redesign-designers-selected https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/boston-city-hall-plaza-rede...
- hx87 10y ago
  Pure brutalism is bad enough, but in Boston (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the US) we just had to muck it up with fake-traditional touches like brick facing that make it look so much worse. IMO the worst part of City Hall isn't the concrete honeycomb superstructure, it's the brick-clad base. Brick is good when its appearance makes structural sense: arches or lintels over openings, proper sills, a combination of headers and stretchers, etc. However it's always monolithic, and the only thing worse than monolithic concrete is monolithic brick. That's why I'll take the BPL extension over city hall any day--at least BPL is purely brutalist and makes no apologies for it.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    Pure brutalism is bad enough I think, just for the building itself, that the Houston Public Library serves its function very well. It is an excellent building for its purpose, and I rather like going there. The courtyard outside, though, is a stellar example of how US culture has completely forgotten how to create public spaces of value. (Why is it that Houston, of all places, seems to be challenged to remember why shade is useful!)
    - ghaff 10y ago
      One of the things that seems to happen is that there's often a sufficient aversion to businesses making money in public spaces that you end up with barren expanses rather than cafes, shops/stalls, etc. In Boston the difference between the utilization of City Hall Plaza and Quincy Market/Fanueil Hall is instructive. That's not to say that public parks need to be crammed full of commerce but people often need some reason beyond "open space" to go into an area.
- linksnapzz 10y ago
  If you can find it, Walt Lockley's "Brutalized in Boston" essay from 2007 is the best critique I've ever found of city hall, and what motivated the design of what appears to be an enormous concrete ziggurat fired point-down into what used to be Scollay Square. I wish I had a copy-it is an enormously enjoyable piece.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Here you go, courtesy of the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20081227044845/http://www.waltlockley.com/boston%20city%20hall/bostoncityhall.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20081227044845/http://www.waltlo... (waltlockley.com still exists although it looks as if it hasn't been updated for almost 10 years. But some of the older content doesn't seem to be there any longer.) ADDED: One fun paragraph from the piece: So imagine the real experience of government through the eyes of a pedestrian forced to traverse a windswept empty plaza ('windswept' is just a word, but, please, understand that it's a whole set of unpleasant sensations, 'windswept' is shorthand for windswept, snowswept, exposed to cold wet penetrating Boston wind, featureless, hard and flat, forbidding, uninteresting, vulnerabilzing, isolating, scaled-to-intimidate), past the broken promise of a fountain that has never ever worked (too bad we don't have a Broken Fountains theory to go along with the Broken Windows theory), to approach the underside of a top-heavy, brooding, hulking concrete fortress (and by 'fortress' I mean instantly, cinematically, viscerally, recognizably-by-shape-alone out of human scale, comparable to the worst of Soviet work), rough to the touch and confusing as hell, a building that wastes your time, a building with cavernous voids vaguely threatening and vaguely empty, so he or she can climb upstairs and register to vote. All metaphors aside, that voter learns things during a journey like that. That voter draws certain conclusions about Boston and voting and his role as a citizen. Whether he knows it or not.
azdle 10y ago
For anyone else interested, here's a picture: https://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_960w/Boston/2011-2020/2016/09/07/BostonGlobe.com/Business/Images/Boston-City-Hall-Plaza-8183277-GEGU-5486.jpg https://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_960w/Boston/2011-2020/2016/09/07...
- kofejnik 10y ago
  this is fugly even by Soviet standards, esp. constrasted to e.g. this one in Moscow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(Moscow)#/media/File:Moscow,_Dushkin%27s_Tower.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(Moscow)#/media/...
  - ghaff 10y ago
    The Seven Sisters aren't representative of ugly mass of concrete Soviet-era architecture though. I'm not sure I'd call them beautiful but they're rather distinctive and they don't jump out as particularly ugly. Wikipedia claims they're a combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic styles but someone with more architectural background than I may have a better classification. As the Wikipedia article also notes the Seven Sisters have considerable similarities to icons like the Wrigley Building in Chicago. (Not sure I buy a couple of the other comparisons.)
    - wott 10y ago
      But Russians sometimes call the "ugly mass of concrete Soviet-era architecture" French style... And well, as a French, I can't claim they are wrong about that :-/
      - ghaff 10y ago
        No, Le Corbusier and all that.
        wott 10y ago
        Yes, that accounts for one part, the one with ideas behind, a style, a urban and a life project. And then there is the other part, the loosely inspired, derived copies with no real plan. Not sure which part brought the worst failures :-)

ghaff 10y ago

Boston City Hall really is an epic attempt to outdo Soviet era totalitarian architecture. There is at least some effort to do something with the windswept brickyard that surrounds it. [1] I haven't followed these plans all that closely but, to the degree the surrounding space can be made more useful/inviting, it would help a lot. I'd also note that the brutalist addition to the Boston Public Library always struck me as rather a desecration of the original Beaux Arts structure but the recent remodel and cleanup actually created a rather open and airy space. I still don't love the architecture but it's a big improvement. [1] https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/boston-city-hall-plaza-redesign-designers-selected https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/boston-city-hall-plaza-rede...

hx87 10y ago
Pure brutalism is bad enough, but in Boston (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the US) we just had to muck it up with fake-traditional touches like brick facing that make it look so much worse. IMO the worst part of City Hall isn't the concrete honeycomb superstructure, it's the brick-clad base. Brick is good when its appearance makes structural sense: arches or lintels over openings, proper sills, a combination of headers and stretchers, etc. However it's always monolithic, and the only thing worse than monolithic concrete is monolithic brick. That's why I'll take the BPL extension over city hall any day--at least BPL is purely brutalist and makes no apologies for it.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Pure brutalism is bad enough I think, just for the building itself, that the Houston Public Library serves its function very well. It is an excellent building for its purpose, and I rather like going there. The courtyard outside, though, is a stellar example of how US culture has completely forgotten how to create public spaces of value. (Why is it that Houston, of all places, seems to be challenged to remember why shade is useful!)
  - ghaff 10y ago
    One of the things that seems to happen is that there's often a sufficient aversion to businesses making money in public spaces that you end up with barren expanses rather than cafes, shops/stalls, etc. In Boston the difference between the utilization of City Hall Plaza and Quincy Market/Fanueil Hall is instructive. That's not to say that public parks need to be crammed full of commerce but people often need some reason beyond "open space" to go into an area.
linksnapzz 10y ago
If you can find it, Walt Lockley's "Brutalized in Boston" essay from 2007 is the best critique I've ever found of city hall, and what motivated the design of what appears to be an enormous concrete ziggurat fired point-down into what used to be Scollay Square. I wish I had a copy-it is an enormously enjoyable piece.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Here you go, courtesy of the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20081227044845/http://www.waltlockley.com/boston%20city%20hall/bostoncityhall.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20081227044845/http://www.waltlo... (waltlockley.com still exists although it looks as if it hasn't been updated for almost 10 years. But some of the older content doesn't seem to be there any longer.) ADDED: One fun paragraph from the piece: So imagine the real experience of government through the eyes of a pedestrian forced to traverse a windswept empty plaza ('windswept' is just a word, but, please, understand that it's a whole set of unpleasant sensations, 'windswept' is shorthand for windswept, snowswept, exposed to cold wet penetrating Boston wind, featureless, hard and flat, forbidding, uninteresting, vulnerabilzing, isolating, scaled-to-intimidate), past the broken promise of a fountain that has never ever worked (too bad we don't have a Broken Fountains theory to go along with the Broken Windows theory), to approach the underside of a top-heavy, brooding, hulking concrete fortress (and by 'fortress' I mean instantly, cinematically, viscerally, recognizably-by-shape-alone out of human scale, comparable to the worst of Soviet work), rough to the touch and confusing as hell, a building that wastes your time, a building with cavernous voids vaguely threatening and vaguely empty, so he or she can climb upstairs and register to vote. All metaphors aside, that voter learns things during a journey like that. That voter draws certain conclusions about Boston and voting and his role as a citizen. Whether he knows it or not.

azdle 10y ago

For anyone else interested, here's a picture: https://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_960w/Boston/2011-2020/2016/09/07/BostonGlobe.com/Business/Images/Boston-City-Hall-Plaza-8183277-GEGU-5486.jpg https://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_960w/Boston/2011-2020/2016/09/07...

kofejnik 10y ago
this is fugly even by Soviet standards, esp. constrasted to e.g. this one in Moscow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(Moscow)#/media/File:Moscow,_Dushkin%27s_Tower.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(Moscow)#/media/...
- ghaff 10y ago
  The Seven Sisters aren't representative of ugly mass of concrete Soviet-era architecture though. I'm not sure I'd call them beautiful but they're rather distinctive and they don't jump out as particularly ugly. Wikipedia claims they're a combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic styles but someone with more architectural background than I may have a better classification. As the Wikipedia article also notes the Seven Sisters have considerable similarities to icons like the Wrigley Building in Chicago. (Not sure I buy a couple of the other comparisons.)
  - wott 10y ago
    But Russians sometimes call the "ugly mass of concrete Soviet-era architecture" French style... And well, as a French, I can't claim they are wrong about that :-/
    - ghaff 10y ago
      No, Le Corbusier and all that.
      - wott 10y ago
        Yes, that accounts for one part, the one with ideas behind, a style, a urban and a life project. And then there is the other part, the loosely inspired, derived copies with no real plan. Not sure which part brought the worst failures :-)