9 ms·

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

Spooky23 2y ago
We don’t have skilled immigrant labor and the post WW2 boom made it difficult to win contracts with high quality building materials and artisans. The Hudson valley of New York had hundreds of brickyards until the 1950s and 60s. Bricks suck because they’re made in like two places, because construction is scaled and needs cheap materials. 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.
nilptr 2y ago
> Why can't we build nice things anymore? 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.
- lucidguppy 2y ago
  Older structures cost more because they lasted longer and were more maintainable. Growth was given priority over tradition - and we've had to deal with the tradeoffs.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    There’s more to it than that. People were rejecting tradition. How many millions were slaughtered in WW1 and 2? There was a feeling that it was time to discard the old and do something different.
- eber 2y ago
  1. They remodeled City Hall Plaza in 2022 [1], unfortunately not a street grid, but less of a cold wasteland than before. 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-renovation/ https://www.sasaki.com/projects/boston-city-hall-plaza-renov...
  - voidfunc 2y ago
    Aware of the remodel and it is indeed an improvement in nice weather months but it's still pretty lacking and absolutely awful Nov to April which is.. close to half a year.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I sort of agree. On the other hand, the outside on a waterfront in a northern US city is probably not going to be great for a good chunk of the year in any case. There are nice parks in the area but they're not exactly delightful in the cold weather months either.
- deeg 2y ago
  > 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. Totally agree with this. I enjoy walking through the interior and I like the building overall but I would hate working there.
  - pivo 2y ago
    A friend worked there for years, she said different offices would either be far too hot or else freezing on the same day. There was never a comfortable room. 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.)
- oceanplexian 2y ago
  > Also, it's a 50 year old structure.. 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.
  - ocschwar 2y ago
    It will not. I guarantee it. The vehicle emissions worming into the bare concrete are acidic. The water from rain and from the humid air slowly degrades it. The salt air doesn't help. At some point, sooner than you think, the corrosion will reach the rebars inside the concrete. 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.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I don't love Brutalism in general but it also just ages pretty poorly. Some of it is about the updating of really crappy interior decor but the renovation of the Boston Public Library brutalist addition really helped a lot--though still, nothing like the original structure.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      I work in the Watergate, and it's in terrible condition after just 60 years. The 1950s post-war mass produced house I grew up in is in better condition. Meanwhile, the Farley Post Office in Manhattan is so gorgeous 110 years later that they built the new Penn Station in it.
    - blacksmythe 2y ago
      Sounds like one solution would be to apply a sealant that looks like bare concrete.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I mostly agree. The backside is just hideous and the brickyard is unnecessarily a wasteland for most of the year. Boston's climate doesn't help but, certainly at least in the warmer months, there could be more of a welcoming commercial presence there like there is outdoors on the other side of City Hall around Quincy Market. The renovation does help somewhat; I agree with other comments. Rarely down that way any longer. Used to work a few blocks from there.
- lambdaphagy 2y ago
  If architectural beauty is subjective, that’s an even stronger argument for building stuff that broad majorities find pleasing instead of stuff designed by architects who write manifestos about how much they hate beauty.
- rayiner 2y ago
  > Well.. first start by defining "beautiful", we're waiting. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Notre-Dame_de_Paris%2C_4_October_2017.jpg/2560px-Notre-Dame_de_Paris%2C_4_October_2017.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/No... https://wmf.imgix.net/images/70_hero_image.jpg?auto=format,compress&fit=max&w=1920 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.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Yes, those are two buildings people find beautiful. You can find lots more like it if you keep turning the dial all the way to "form" and away from "function".
  - astrange 2y ago
    It seems difficult to fit a city hall in either of them.
- tacticalturtle 2y ago
  The one nice part of the wasteland plaza is that it can hold large outdoor exhibitions in a way that no other space in downtown area can. 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.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Although Commonwealth Shakespeare has performances on the Common every summer and there's a fairly large underground parking garage there.
Symmetry 2y ago
Samuel Hughes at Works in Progress has been writing a bunch on this general topic recently. Most relevant: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/making-architecture-easy/ 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.
rayiner 2y ago
Because architects went from building monuments to God and creation to building monuments to their own narcissism. Notre Dame (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Notre-Dame-de-Paris https://www.britannica.com/topic/Notre-Dame-de-Paris) was meant to be pleasing to God. And by implication, to man, because man was created in the image of God. Boston City Hall wasn't meant to be pleasing to anyone. It's more important to "make a statement" than to make something that is beautiful and uplifting.
- tptacek 2y ago
  The point of Notre Dame is to be a monument to God. That's not the point of most buildings. Ironically, the other example of a good building you've provided in this thread, the Taj Mahal, is in fact a monument to narcissism.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    The Taj Mahal is covered in arabic inscriptions from the Quran: https://www.wonders-of-the-world.net/Taj-Mahal/Scriptures-on-the-Taj-Mahal.php https://www.wonders-of-the-world.net/Taj-Mahal/Scriptures-on... 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_Revival_architecture
    - tptacek 2y ago
      As you obviously know, the Taj Mahal is a memorial to the empress consort to the Mughal emperor.
      - rayiner 2y ago
        Yes, but it’s design and memorialization to her are deeply intertwined with religious significance: http://counterlightsrantsandblather1.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-taj-mahal-enter-thou-among-my.html http://counterlightsrantsandblather1.blogspot.com/2013/12/th... (“According to Muslim tradition on the Indian subcontinent, women who died in childbirth are regarded as saints. Shah Jahan had all the more reason to revere his beloved wife as a saint when she died giving birth to their fourteenth child. The design of the Taj Mahal reflects the legacy Shah Jahan wished to create for his deceased wife, not only as deceased royalty, but as a saint. Our experience of the Taj and its gardens is not only about grief for a beloved wife, but a foretaste of the paradise that awaits the righteous and a premonition of the final Day of Reckoning as it is described in the Quran.”) It was built by people who feared God and wanted to build something lovely in his sight.
m0llusk 2y ago
The old city hall had a decorated cake look, but was a dysfunctional structure. There was nowhere to gather outside except the sidewalk. Entry was primarily through a large set of stairs that limited access. Once inside there was nowhere to gather, only a maze of narrow corridors servicing cramped offices with limited access to light and air. 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.

We don’t have skilled immigrant labor and the post WW2 boom made it difficult to win contracts with high quality building materials and artisans. The Hudson valley of New York had hundreds of brickyards until the 1950s and 60s. Bricks suck because they’re made in like two places, because construction is scaled and needs cheap materials. 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.

nilptr 2y ago

> Why can't we build nice things anymore? 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.

lucidguppy 2y ago
Older structures cost more because they lasted longer and were more maintainable. Growth was given priority over tradition - and we've had to deal with the tradeoffs.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  There’s more to it than that. People were rejecting tradition. How many millions were slaughtered in WW1 and 2? There was a feeling that it was time to discard the old and do something different.
eber 2y ago
1. They remodeled City Hall Plaza in 2022 [1], unfortunately not a street grid, but less of a cold wasteland than before. 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-renovation/ https://www.sasaki.com/projects/boston-city-hall-plaza-renov...
- voidfunc 2y ago
  Aware of the remodel and it is indeed an improvement in nice weather months but it's still pretty lacking and absolutely awful Nov to April which is.. close to half a year.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I sort of agree. On the other hand, the outside on a waterfront in a northern US city is probably not going to be great for a good chunk of the year in any case. There are nice parks in the area but they're not exactly delightful in the cold weather months either.
deeg 2y ago
> 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. Totally agree with this. I enjoy walking through the interior and I like the building overall but I would hate working there.
- pivo 2y ago
  A friend worked there for years, she said different offices would either be far too hot or else freezing on the same day. There was never a comfortable room. 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.)
oceanplexian 2y ago
> Also, it's a 50 year old structure.. 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.
- ocschwar 2y ago
  It will not. I guarantee it. The vehicle emissions worming into the bare concrete are acidic. The water from rain and from the humid air slowly degrades it. The salt air doesn't help. At some point, sooner than you think, the corrosion will reach the rebars inside the concrete. 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.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I don't love Brutalism in general but it also just ages pretty poorly. Some of it is about the updating of really crappy interior decor but the renovation of the Boston Public Library brutalist addition really helped a lot--though still, nothing like the original structure.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    I work in the Watergate, and it's in terrible condition after just 60 years. The 1950s post-war mass produced house I grew up in is in better condition. Meanwhile, the Farley Post Office in Manhattan is so gorgeous 110 years later that they built the new Penn Station in it.
  - blacksmythe 2y ago
    Sounds like one solution would be to apply a sealant that looks like bare concrete.
ghaff 2y ago
I mostly agree. The backside is just hideous and the brickyard is unnecessarily a wasteland for most of the year. Boston's climate doesn't help but, certainly at least in the warmer months, there could be more of a welcoming commercial presence there like there is outdoors on the other side of City Hall around Quincy Market. The renovation does help somewhat; I agree with other comments. Rarely down that way any longer. Used to work a few blocks from there.
lambdaphagy 2y ago
If architectural beauty is subjective, that’s an even stronger argument for building stuff that broad majorities find pleasing instead of stuff designed by architects who write manifestos about how much they hate beauty.
rayiner 2y ago
> Well.. first start by defining "beautiful", we're waiting. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Notre-Dame_de_Paris%2C_4_October_2017.jpg/2560px-Notre-Dame_de_Paris%2C_4_October_2017.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/No... https://wmf.imgix.net/images/70_hero_image.jpg?auto=format,compress&fit=max&w=1920 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.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Yes, those are two buildings people find beautiful. You can find lots more like it if you keep turning the dial all the way to "form" and away from "function".
- astrange 2y ago
  It seems difficult to fit a city hall in either of them.
tacticalturtle 2y ago
The one nice part of the wasteland plaza is that it can hold large outdoor exhibitions in a way that no other space in downtown area can. 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.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Although Commonwealth Shakespeare has performances on the Common every summer and there's a fairly large underground parking garage there.

Symmetry 2y ago

Samuel Hughes at Works in Progress has been writing a bunch on this general topic recently. Most relevant: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/making-architecture-easy/ 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.

rayiner 2y ago

Because architects went from building monuments to God and creation to building monuments to their own narcissism. Notre Dame (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Notre-Dame-de-Paris https://www.britannica.com/topic/Notre-Dame-de-Paris) was meant to be pleasing to God. And by implication, to man, because man was created in the image of God. Boston City Hall wasn't meant to be pleasing to anyone. It's more important to "make a statement" than to make something that is beautiful and uplifting.

tptacek 2y ago
The point of Notre Dame is to be a monument to God. That's not the point of most buildings. Ironically, the other example of a good building you've provided in this thread, the Taj Mahal, is in fact a monument to narcissism.
- rayiner 2y ago
  The Taj Mahal is covered in arabic inscriptions from the Quran: https://www.wonders-of-the-world.net/Taj-Mahal/Scriptures-on-the-Taj-Mahal.php https://www.wonders-of-the-world.net/Taj-Mahal/Scriptures-on... 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_Revival_architecture
  - tptacek 2y ago
    As you obviously know, the Taj Mahal is a memorial to the empress consort to the Mughal emperor.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      Yes, but it’s design and memorialization to her are deeply intertwined with religious significance: http://counterlightsrantsandblather1.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-taj-mahal-enter-thou-among-my.html http://counterlightsrantsandblather1.blogspot.com/2013/12/th... (“According to Muslim tradition on the Indian subcontinent, women who died in childbirth are regarded as saints. Shah Jahan had all the more reason to revere his beloved wife as a saint when she died giving birth to their fourteenth child. The design of the Taj Mahal reflects the legacy Shah Jahan wished to create for his deceased wife, not only as deceased royalty, but as a saint. Our experience of the Taj and its gardens is not only about grief for a beloved wife, but a foretaste of the paradise that awaits the righteous and a premonition of the final Day of Reckoning as it is described in the Quran.”) It was built by people who feared God and wanted to build something lovely in his sight.

m0llusk 2y ago

The old city hall had a decorated cake look, but was a dysfunctional structure. There was nowhere to gather outside except the sidewalk. Entry was primarily through a large set of stairs that limited access. Once inside there was nowhere to gather, only a maze of narrow corridors servicing cramped offices with limited access to light and air. 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.