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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 wh

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.

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.