City Hall: #1 world's biggest eyesore?

[callahan]

Travel Picks: 10 top ugly buildings and monuments

SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) ? Travel can open your eyes to some of the world's most beautiful sights and buildings -- and to some of the ugliest.

Web site VirtualTourist.com (www.virtualtourist.com) has come up with a list of "The World's Top 10 Ugliest Buildings and Monuments" according to their editors and readers. Reuters has not endorsed this list.

"Some of these picks have all the charm of a bag of nails while others are just jaw-dropping in their complexity. Love them or hate them, the list is certainly entertaining," said General manager Giampiero Ambrosi.

1. Boston City Hall; Boston, Massachusetts

While it was hip for it's time, this concrete structure now gets routinely criticized for its dreary facade and incongruity with the rest of the city's more genteel architecture. Luckily, it's very close to more aesthetically pleasing attractions.

2. Montparnasse Tower; Paris, France

While it's almost universally agreed that this ominous stick is a blight on the landscape of the world's most stunning city, its detractors admit that there is one very good reason to take in the view from the building's observation deck: it's the only place you can go to get a view of the city without it.

3. LuckyShoe Monument; Tuuri, Finland

It may be over-the-top, but there is something to be said for the giant, golden horseshoe that looms over Finland's second-largest shopping center. The shoe, and, in fact, the entire town in which it is situated, is said to bring good luck.

4. Metropolitan Cathedral; Liverpool, England

The people who work here must be sick of the space capsule jokes. Even those who find the building's shell a bit "spacey," have to admit the circular interior is pretty spectacular.

5. Port Authority Bus Terminal; New York City, New York

Those who pass by this iron monstrosity might be tempted to ask about a completion date, but alas, this is the finished product.

6. Torres de Colon; Madrid, Spain

Like a set of giant salt-and-pepper shakers, these matching towers loom over the city to the dissatisfaction of many area residents. The buildings are also known as "El Enchufe" or "The Plug" for the plug-like structure that holds them together.

7. Liechtenstein Museum of Fine Arts; Vaduz, Liechtenstein

Some feel the building's minimalist box design is a triumph, others say it's an eyesore.

8. Scottish Parliament Building; Edinburgh, Scotland

Stone, oak, and bamboo are part of the make-up of the Scottish Parliament, a building that is the subject of much debate.

9. Birmingham Central Library; Birmingham, England

One look and it's easy to see how this genre of architecture came to be known as the "Brutalist" style. Not surprisingly, the issue of its possible demolition has been looming for years.

10. Peter the Great Statue; Moscow, Russia

Some 15 stories high, the larger-than-life monument was designed by controversial artist, Zurab K. Tsereteli, whose statue of Christopher Columbus was repeatedly rejected by the United States.

(Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081114/lf_nm_life/us_travel_picks_ugly

 

[Bubbybu]

awesome publicity

 

[JSic]

Its bad but I wouldn't go this far. Heck, we've got bigger eyesores just in this city (Congress St. Garage, State Service Center).

 

[disturbanist]

At least City Hall and its plaza is better than "little Brasilia" in upstate NY. Rockefeller's/Harrison's pile of puke should be put on this list.

 

[Lrfox]

^I agree, Empire State Plaza is an eyesore, but many find aspects of it (the "Egg") charming and attractive.

I also disagree with Montparnasse. Out of scale, yes; an ugly building, no.

I think a building can be out of scale and still be attractive. Judging by some of the structures on the list, the author would disagree with me.

 

[TheBostonian]

Wow, Birmingham library looks a lot like Boston City Hall.

 

[czsz]

Screw these philistines; the Scottish parliament hardly qualifies.

 

[underground]

Come on! City Hall isn't even the worst building on the plaza. Who ever wrote this article has obviously never been to Governemnt Ctr. Plaza, because if they had, they'd realize that the building directly across from City Hall is by far and away worse. Hell, even that isn't the worst in the city! I'd reserve that award for the O'Neil Building down by N. Station.

 

[kennedy]

The Ft. Worth city hall looks strikingly similar to the top portion of the Boston City Hall.

 

[yigal]

Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang:

We should be perfectly happy with city hall...

 

[choo]

"Boston, at least its not Pyongyang"

If that doesn't say that all of gov't center has to go I don't know what does.

 

[statler]

I'm going to repost this here (very slightly edited, you can read the original here). I hope ablarc doesn't mind.

[...]explain exactly what makes this building so great?

And now I?m getting homework assignments.

Some things are hard to like unless you make an effort. Examples are opera, caviar, Gertrude Stein, Zen Buddhism, James Joyce, cilantro, Garcia Lorca, twelve-tone music, Immanuel Kant, Jorge Luis Borges, twelve-tone music for the umpteenth time, Jackson Pollock, foie gras, frog?s legs, tripe, brains, oysters, Steve Reich, Kasimir Malevich, Michelangelo Antonioni, Leonard Cohen and Brutalist architecture. All acquired tastes.

You've already convinced me it should be saved but nobody has done a good job of explaining why.

Explaining is hard for the same reason most folks don?t bother with understanding: you have to rack your brains, and that?s work. It?s easier to just dismiss it. The list above contains difficult food ingredients and difficult human achievements. By definition, the difficult human achievements took intellectual rigor to create and they take the same faculty to grasp.

Most folks who throw in the towel a few pages into Finnegan?s Wake don?t really dare dismiss Joyce, coz they?ve heard he?s deep. They read on the Net that literary critics think Ulysses the greatest novel of the English language, and they?re not about to put in the effort to see if that?s true. So they leave it at that.

More folks feel free to diss, say, Wagner without making any real effort to see where he?s coming from; the fat sopranos provide them with a cheap shot --even as doubts may linger about whether they got it right.

But most of us have heard we?re all experts in architecture; after all, we spend most of our time in it.

Don?t you believe it !

Few of us go anywhere near any real architecture most days, just as most of what we read isn?t literature. Architecture is not synonymous with buildings, and most buildings aren?t architecture.

Architecture is rarefied artistic rigor applied to making a building. This means dreaming up a unified and meaningful whole. All works of art are that; they hang together.

I design forty or fifty buildings per annum, and most years not one of them qualifies as architecture. Most clients not only don?t want architecture, but if they catch an inkling of what it is they actively loathe it. And well they should, because it can?t possibly serve their purposes unless they?re already looking for it, for architecture is never just utilitarian; even the Bauhaus is anything but that.

Confronted with the prospect of architecture, most clients wisely recoil in horror, knowing it will alter their habits, demand maintenance and understanding, may expose them to their peers? ridicule or censure, will leak and make them hot or cold, and likely lighten their wallets. Architecture is much too risky; anyone who really wants it already has a somewhat masochistic devotion to art. These folks are rare and easily identified.

City Hall is a collection of fat sopranos.

Once you get into its conceptual reality, you won?t just like it; you?ll love it. Did you ever meet a lukewarm opera buff?

Mostly it's just "because I said so" or empty platitudes about how powerful and bold the building is.

I?ll spare you that because you can see it for yourself,

But since I have to design buildings myself I can reveal a little about how hard it must have been to juggle all the components of City Hall so they hang together as an artistic whole.

The fancy term for this is tectonics, which the dictionary says is the science or art of assembling, shaping, or ornamenting materials in construction.

In keeping with their Modernist predilections and their minimalist leanings, Kallmann and McKinnell made their art out of the science. The question was: how much compositional interest would emerge from the rigorous and correct application of a very small number of rules and their intersection with the nature of the narrow spectrum of building materials chosen. Like Mies: they believed that less is more, but not so little it?s a bore.

Their building?s tectonic components are the structural and mechanical systems, and there?s precious little else to this building (except glass infill where the structure isn?t). The structural materials are brick and two kinds of concrete: poured-in-place and precast, which has a different nature.

And here?s a surprise: in their reductionist zeal, they made the upper levels? structure double as the mechanical system. Concrete ducts !! You can see them clamber up the building?s outside; that?s what those massive cement fins are that function ?decoratively? at the upper levels, like colossal dentil molding. Simultaneously they serve as the building?s structure and enclosure. To synthesize, to hang together, to do more with less.

?I like an arch,? replied the brick, when Louis Kahn famously inquired what it wanted. That wasn?t the answer Kallmann and McKinnell wanted to hear; as card carrying Modernists, they knew arches were verboten. So they relegated brick to their building?s lower realms, where it wasn?t required to make openings (something it does pure and correct without steel only as an arch). Earthbound, it became a metaphor for terra firma, a role confirmed by organic fusion with the vast brick plaza, and by the literal fact that brick is clay.

From mother earth spring foursquare geysers of once-fluid concrete: congealed, they?re cement sequoias, at once lofty, sturdy and as differentiated as individual trees in a forest. These are the mainframes both literally and figuratively of the entire civic structure. They hold up the building, they link earth to sky, at the entrance they greet you with soaring sylvan monumentality onto which you can project your civic pride in Boston?s virtuous government or feel oppressed by its corruption and bureaucracy: the same forms will serve for either, the choice is yours.

From here, space corkscrews heavenward past cantilevered council chambers, elevator shafts, monumental stairs and a now bunkerish mayor?s office that you could freely visit in happier days. Like the brick below, all this poured beton brut reminds of Rome?s identical brick and concrete building technology: solid, compressive, imperial, built for the ages, and susceptible to barbarians.

Here also may lie the building?s symbolic weakness, for on top of all this poured monumentality and upbeat symbolism lie draped like wet blankets: three layers of precast bureaucracy! O, parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

Oh, it gives those folks a view who are confined there all day. But mostly it gives you the completed composition that was this entire building?s formal impetus from the get-go: an inverted-pyramid composition motivated by a desire to depict. In Venturi?s terms it?s a duck, for this building is actually a thinly disguised sculpture, a statue of ? another building! And that building is the Monastery of LaTourette.

So there you have it, another layer of symbolism: City Hall as monastery . Or perhaps you?d prefer: City Government as inverted pyramid . Or would you care for Topheavy Government ?

The fact that the top is precast is brilliant, because precast is the next logical progression in the structural evolution of masonry as you go up light to the sky and forward in history. Industrialized factory construction allows a uniform and standardized module, and steel reinforcement permits an almost gossamer lightness in the context of this building?s otherwise pachydermal ambiance. Mechanical systems are threaded through the gaps, and lighting courses through the lower chords in a marvel of integrated design.

What to a layman seem clunky beams with rectangular gaps register as elegant Vierendel trusses to an engineer, supported correctly at their fifth points, ends cantilevered. The panel points of these supports are conveyed downward as columns or transfer beams to the lower floors, which therefore acquire the exact and regular modular order of their upper brethren, like a drumbeat but with contrapuntal improvisations. A tour-de-force of spatial ordering that fully integrates the building, like writing a business letter in iambic pentameter.

Did someone say ?cantilever?? Why that?s a thematic subtext throughout this building, where all outside corners are cantilevered and all three upper floors are corbelled (cantilevered) outward from the floor below. Structure in the service of massing. Like writing an iambic-pentameter business letter in which now all the sentences rhyme.

I don?t know if the proportioning and dimensioning is done according to the Modulor (Golden Section) as in Corbu?s original of which this is a formally structured set of improvised variations, but if it is that?s like adding yet another layer of integrating formal order, infinitely subtle, like making each sentence in the business letter start with a letter in an acronym.

Does all this matter? What is it really but a shameless display of virtuoso skill and intellectual rigor? Even fuller of artifice -- to those who can see them-- than Vermeer?s little optical highlights or Mozart?s abrupt forays into minor keys. Does it matter that Beethoven?s Fifth Symphony is all organized ?macro and micro-- out of a pattern of four notes? Does that make it better than if it were pleasant melodic noodling? Does it matter that the iconography of a Gothic portal may reveal prophetic secrets of the Book of Daniel? Does it matter that the juggler finally figured out how to add a seventh twirling plate? Would it matter if the complete discography of Max Roach vanished tomorrow? Does it matter? Of course not.

What use, after all, is art when we can replace it with profit ?especially if we can simultaneously declare it ugly and have most folks murmur agreement. And what, oh what can be done with a building with dirty concrete, bad heat and a bad rap?

I can?t tell you if Boston City Hall is ugly, because to me the question is meaningless. Maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder. All I know is I don?t have the brainpower or the creative inventiveness to pull off something simultaneously so tightly organized and formally varied in a million years of trying. So difficult?

Maybe we could respect that. Others have in the past.



One way to measure the importance of something is by how much else it has affected, and you can gauge something?s effects by the number of its imitators. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Boston City Hall has been much admired.

City Hall?s imitators are everywhere. Charlotte has two. One is a college classroom building, another is the Charlotte Observer.

Dallas has at least one. ?And it?s the City Hall !!

Boston doesn?t have an imitation of Dallas? City Hall. Dallas has an imitation of Boston?s City Hall.

An exterior whose exterior expression is composed entirely of its structure and its mechanical system: do you recognize the schema of the Pompidou Center?

An architect who tells you he?s not influenced by other architects is a liar. For about fifteen years, Boston?s City Hall influenced more building designs than any new building on the planet. And Boston has the original !!

Boston can be proud.

 

[Beton Brut]

Boston City Hall, in convenient musical form.

 

[ablarc]

^ Difficult, hard to like, lacking popular appeal?



Not pretty?

 

[Beton Brut]

All of the above, ablarc. Your post here inspired this response.

For the curious and intrepid, the Simpson Ninth is the best parts of Sibelius, Nielsen, and Shostakovitch, boiled down to 40 minutes of very heavy music. It's unpolished, yet purposeful. I can't say if Brahms or Bruckner would have liked it, but they would have understood it. In terms of craft, scale, and focus, it may be the single finest symphonic work of the last quarter century.

 

[unterbau]

Boston City Hall, in convenient musical form.

Don't you mean: youtube.com/watch?v=cAOB6MNrbZo

 

[Beton Brut]

^^ Damn copyright laws...

With apologies to a certain Spanish painter, Gerhard Kallmann was never called an asshole.

 

[unterbau]

arrrgh, how do you get this board to not embed a youtube link?

 

[Beton Brut]

Don't use quick reply. Post the link as plain text. (WAG).

 

[unterbau]

Don't use quick reply. Post the link as plain text. (WAG).

I told it not to parse for urls and i didn't even include the http://... this board is seriously persistent