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Boston City Hall routinely ranks as one of the ugliest buildings on earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Ci

Boston City Hall routinely ranks as one of the ugliest buildings on earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall Brutalist concrete building straight out of 1984. Really gets you mentally prepared for the labyrinth, dispassionate and uncaring bureaucracy that awaits you inside. > The building has been subject to nearly universal public condemnation, and is often called one of the world's ugliest buildings. Calls for the structure to be demolished have been regularly made even before construction was finished. I highly recommend anyone who visits Boston take some time to walk around it and even inside of it. It really is something to experience, unfortunately for me I experience it every day of my life.

Finnucane 7y ago
It seems particularly bad in its surroundings, the barren concrete plaza that it looms over. The whole effect as you cross in front is of a projection of Stalinist state power.
ekianjo 7y ago
James H Kunstler had a great talk mentioning the Boston City Hall among many things that's wrong with modern design: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
biztos 7y ago
Preparing you for the soulless bureaucracy is probably good form-following-function, unless of course it is also helping to create that soullessness.
notatoad 7y ago
is the red brick construction in front of it [1] part of the original design? i could appreciate it if it were a purely brutalist concrete design, but it's the mishmash of bare concrete and brick in weird shapes that makes this truly ugly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall#/media/File:2017_Boston_City_Hall_side_view.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall#/media/File:2...
concretion 7y ago
If you have to experience it every day, and you don't have any choice in the matter, it's in your interest to put some effort into appreciating it as architecture. Lots of people do think that it's a great work of architecture. Not every experience of art, music, etc. is going to appeal to you at the start. Some things are worth learning about. It's worth cultivating a real sensitivity to brutalism among many other things. I know this sounds sanctimonious. OTOH rejecting a controversial piece of creative work in a shrill and clichéd way sounds ignorant and arrogant.
- rayiner 7y ago
  > Not every experience of art, music, etc. is going to appeal to you at the start. Some things are worth learning about. It's worth cultivating a real sensitivity to brutalism among many other things. > I know this sounds sanctimonious. OTOH rejecting a controversial piece of creative work in a shrill and clichéd way sounds ignorant and arrogant The ordinary people of Boston shouldn’t have to “cultivate a sensitivity” to something sitting on their public land, built for their use paid for with their tax dollars. Public architecture should cater to the tastes of the masses—that is the sole legitimate criterion for judging public art and architecture—not the egos and fantasies of the architectural elite.
xenocyon 7y ago
You're conflating brutalism and soulless/inhuman/ugly concrete-heavy design; this is a common misunderstanding. Brutalism when done thoughtfully and well is beautiful, uplifting, and provides a sense of calm and space. The Simon Fraser U campus is a good example: https://modernistarchitecture.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-brutalist-acropolis-in-great-white.html https://modernistarchitecture.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-brutali...
- rayiner 7y ago
  Still ugly, imposing, and not human scale.
- cgh 7y ago
  You should probably speak to some actual SFU grads about this “uplifting” architecture sometime. Locally, it’s known as a place that exacerbates depression.
- growlist 7y ago
  > Brutalism when done thoughtfully and well is beautiful, uplifting, and provides a sense of calm and space And yet common folk - unfairly deprived of an education in hifalutin architecture-speak - still seem to consider brutalism to be as ugly as sin.
- remarkEon 7y ago
  Concrete buildings like this, even when thoughtfully designed, end up looking decrepit and decayed after just a couple of years as the concrete ages and discolours. I see nothing “uplifting” about that building.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  To me that's not 'beautiful'. It's the same unpleasant monochrome concrete architecture I was stuck with in community college, just on a larger scale.
- Fricken 7y ago
  Check out this list of movies that utilized the SFU campus: https://604now.com/movies-filmed-at-sfu/ https://604now.com/movies-filmed-at-sfu/ In every case the campus is used to represent the headquarters of some government agency or military facility, or as the setting for some dystopian sci-fi. I'm interested in both brutalism and dystopian sci-fi, but I don't want to live in a dystopian future, and I don't like being around the brutalist architecture in my city either.
aasasd 7y ago
Pffft, it barely has anything on the more imposing among Soviet buildings—mostly municipal ones. In fact, the irregularity of structure below the two top floors provide some diversion for the eye. When I look at brutalism abstracted from its surroundings and signs of everyday life, it really hits me how it resembles Quake maps. I.e. it embraces variety of structure just as much as uniformity of the looks: https://www.format.com/magazine/galleries/design/lego-sculpture-instagram-brutalist-portfolio https://www.format.com/magazine/galleries/design/lego-sculpt...
rayiner 7y ago
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/why-architectural-elites-love-ugly-buildings/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/why-architectur... > Almost everyone now understands that the Corbusian legacy was entirely malign, even if they have never heard of the man himself. And the question is often asked how his grim concrete megalomania ever came to hold such sway in the first place. Step inside a Western school of architecture to pose this question, and you might get a shock. You are likely to find that the so-called “fathers” of the International Style in general, and Le Corbusier in particular (he of the tabula rasa concept of urban renewal in which everywhere “must” be “totally rebuilt” using only concrete), are still revered as the philosopher kings of architecture.
cgh 7y ago
From the Wikipedia article you linked: “Architects and critics considered it to be excellent work, with one poll finding that professional architects describe Boston City Hall as one of the ten proudest achievements of American architecture.”
- seibelj 7y ago
  This is the problem. Ivory tower architecture academics get ahold of taxpayer money and build something the vast majority of the population, who is forced to live with it everyday, despises. Mayor for Life Menino planned on demolishing it, but the financial crisis happened and then he died before getting the chance. A horrible blunder which shows the limits of giving a tiny elite control of the process. When it’s gone no one will shed a tear except a few professors. In the modern era everything is debated on the internet, and this disaster would have been shouted down before ever happening.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    One of my theories is after WWII a lot of fields of study, like psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology, economics, architecture, etc, went completely sideways into loony coo-coo land. The result were nihilistic/ideological trashfires. Most of them have recovered like psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology. Economics and architecture really haven't.
crooked-v 7y ago
I feel like the true ugliness in that particular building is less about the material, more about how it looks unpleasantly like it started as a normal cuboid and then grew lopsided cysts to produce its current shape.
chris_st 7y ago
That is, perhaps, uglier than the J Edgar Hoover building[0] (headquarters of the FBI) in Washington, DC, and my previous gold standard for Brutalist hideosity. My condolences on having to go there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building
rsynnott 7y ago
This is all pretty subjective; I personally like this stuff. And it's certainly more distinctive than your average lots-of-glass modern design. For instance, this building was controversial, but you couldn't call it boring: http://www.sosbrutalism.org/sixcms/media.php/1685/thumbnails/20160120_132322.jpg.2809534.jpg http://www.sosbrutalism.org/sixcms/media.php/1685/thumbnails... It has now been demolished, and is being replaced with this glass thing which is approximately identical to all other office buildings built in Dublin in the last decade: https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.2674616.1465234544!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/box_620_330/image.jpg https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.2674616.1465234544!... (It used to house the embassy of Australia among other stuff, which always felt a bit odd. Probably Dublin's second weirdest embassy venue; Japan, whose embassy is in a shopping center above a large Tesco, still wins that one).

Finnucane 7y ago

It seems particularly bad in its surroundings, the barren concrete plaza that it looms over. The whole effect as you cross in front is of a projection of Stalinist state power.

ekianjo 7y ago

James H Kunstler had a great talk mentioning the Boston City Hall among many things that's wrong with modern design: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...

biztos 7y ago

Preparing you for the soulless bureaucracy is probably good form-following-function, unless of course it is also helping to create that soullessness.

notatoad 7y ago

is the red brick construction in front of it [1] part of the original design? i could appreciate it if it were a purely brutalist concrete design, but it's the mishmash of bare concrete and brick in weird shapes that makes this truly ugly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall#/media/File:2017_Boston_City_Hall_side_view.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall#/media/File:2...

concretion 7y ago

If you have to experience it every day, and you don't have any choice in the matter, it's in your interest to put some effort into appreciating it as architecture. Lots of people do think that it's a great work of architecture. Not every experience of art, music, etc. is going to appeal to you at the start. Some things are worth learning about. It's worth cultivating a real sensitivity to brutalism among many other things. I know this sounds sanctimonious. OTOH rejecting a controversial piece of creative work in a shrill and clichéd way sounds ignorant and arrogant.

rayiner 7y ago
> Not every experience of art, music, etc. is going to appeal to you at the start. Some things are worth learning about. It's worth cultivating a real sensitivity to brutalism among many other things. > I know this sounds sanctimonious. OTOH rejecting a controversial piece of creative work in a shrill and clichéd way sounds ignorant and arrogant The ordinary people of Boston shouldn’t have to “cultivate a sensitivity” to something sitting on their public land, built for their use paid for with their tax dollars. Public architecture should cater to the tastes of the masses—that is the sole legitimate criterion for judging public art and architecture—not the egos and fantasies of the architectural elite.

xenocyon 7y ago

You're conflating brutalism and soulless/inhuman/ugly concrete-heavy design; this is a common misunderstanding. Brutalism when done thoughtfully and well is beautiful, uplifting, and provides a sense of calm and space. The Simon Fraser U campus is a good example: https://modernistarchitecture.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-brutalist-acropolis-in-great-white.html https://modernistarchitecture.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-brutali...

rayiner 7y ago
Still ugly, imposing, and not human scale.
cgh 7y ago
You should probably speak to some actual SFU grads about this “uplifting” architecture sometime. Locally, it’s known as a place that exacerbates depression.
growlist 7y ago
> Brutalism when done thoughtfully and well is beautiful, uplifting, and provides a sense of calm and space And yet common folk - unfairly deprived of an education in hifalutin architecture-speak - still seem to consider brutalism to be as ugly as sin.
remarkEon 7y ago
Concrete buildings like this, even when thoughtfully designed, end up looking decrepit and decayed after just a couple of years as the concrete ages and discolours. I see nothing “uplifting” about that building.
crooked-v 7y ago
To me that's not 'beautiful'. It's the same unpleasant monochrome concrete architecture I was stuck with in community college, just on a larger scale.
Fricken 7y ago
Check out this list of movies that utilized the SFU campus: https://604now.com/movies-filmed-at-sfu/ https://604now.com/movies-filmed-at-sfu/ In every case the campus is used to represent the headquarters of some government agency or military facility, or as the setting for some dystopian sci-fi. I'm interested in both brutalism and dystopian sci-fi, but I don't want to live in a dystopian future, and I don't like being around the brutalist architecture in my city either.

aasasd 7y ago

Pffft, it barely has anything on the more imposing among Soviet buildings—mostly municipal ones. In fact, the irregularity of structure below the two top floors provide some diversion for the eye. When I look at brutalism abstracted from its surroundings and signs of everyday life, it really hits me how it resembles Quake maps. I.e. it embraces variety of structure just as much as uniformity of the looks: https://www.format.com/magazine/galleries/design/lego-sculpture-instagram-brutalist-portfolio https://www.format.com/magazine/galleries/design/lego-sculpt...

rayiner 7y ago

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/why-architectural-elites-love-ugly-buildings/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/why-architectur... > Almost everyone now understands that the Corbusian legacy was entirely malign, even if they have never heard of the man himself. And the question is often asked how his grim concrete megalomania ever came to hold such sway in the first place. Step inside a Western school of architecture to pose this question, and you might get a shock. You are likely to find that the so-called “fathers” of the International Style in general, and Le Corbusier in particular (he of the tabula rasa concept of urban renewal in which everywhere “must” be “totally rebuilt” using only concrete), are still revered as the philosopher kings of architecture.

cgh 7y ago

From the Wikipedia article you linked: “Architects and critics considered it to be excellent work, with one poll finding that professional architects describe Boston City Hall as one of the ten proudest achievements of American architecture.”

seibelj 7y ago
This is the problem. Ivory tower architecture academics get ahold of taxpayer money and build something the vast majority of the population, who is forced to live with it everyday, despises. Mayor for Life Menino planned on demolishing it, but the financial crisis happened and then he died before getting the chance. A horrible blunder which shows the limits of giving a tiny elite control of the process. When it’s gone no one will shed a tear except a few professors. In the modern era everything is debated on the internet, and this disaster would have been shouted down before ever happening.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  One of my theories is after WWII a lot of fields of study, like psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology, economics, architecture, etc, went completely sideways into loony coo-coo land. The result were nihilistic/ideological trashfires. Most of them have recovered like psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology. Economics and architecture really haven't.

crooked-v 7y ago

I feel like the true ugliness in that particular building is less about the material, more about how it looks unpleasantly like it started as a normal cuboid and then grew lopsided cysts to produce its current shape.

chris_st 7y ago

That is, perhaps, uglier than the J Edgar Hoover building[0] (headquarters of the FBI) in Washington, DC, and my previous gold standard for Brutalist hideosity. My condolences on having to go there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building

rsynnott 7y ago

This is all pretty subjective; I personally like this stuff. And it's certainly more distinctive than your average lots-of-glass modern design. For instance, this building was controversial, but you couldn't call it boring: http://www.sosbrutalism.org/sixcms/media.php/1685/thumbnails/20160120_132322.jpg.2809534.jpg http://www.sosbrutalism.org/sixcms/media.php/1685/thumbnails... It has now been demolished, and is being replaced with this glass thing which is approximately identical to all other office buildings built in Dublin in the last decade: https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.2674616.1465234544!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/box_620_330/image.jpg https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.2674616.1465234544!... (It used to house the embassy of Australia among other stuff, which always felt a bit odd. Probably Dublin's second weirdest embassy venue; Japan, whose embassy is in a shopping center above a large Tesco, still wins that one).