City Hall Discussion - Redevelopment - Preservation - Relocation

http://www.mccahome.com/jhcc_flo.html

If the "lower level" is at Boylston Street level, as indicated in this floor plan, then I see the constraints that would be faced when adding retail.

floorplan_jhcc_lower.gif
 
Yeah. Pretty much the only thing at the Boylston Street level is the entrance. You immediately go up an escalator to the next floor to get to anything 'real' in the building.

We should start a separate topic for the Hynes.
 
bowesst said:
And what would take its place? Most likely another boring uninspired building. I'd rather see it stay put, but rehabilitated for another use.
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03cy6.jpg
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I wish that the barbarism of destroying City Hall were mitigated by the restoration of the fine grain of the old Scollay Sq. Alas, there is no evidence that today's developers have any interest in building small, multiple-building blocks, or that they can be pushed to do so by a mayor whose greatest contribution to architecture is R2D2's ill-conceived head. In fact, if recent experience is anything to go by, the new Scollay Sq. will look like this:

197528502_682c9827f6_o.jpg

(and this was chosen as a relatively flattering angle). This is the best city block Boston has produced in 100 years...

So even if I granted that 'ugly' means very much, and that it describes City Hall, (and I grant neither), we'd be looking at replacing an ugly but powerful and impressive building by a bunch of ugly and timid bores. A worthwhile trade-off?

Nobody here has really addressed a question that ablarc raises in his WiredNY thread. New Yorkers shrugged when Penn Station was razed; Bostonians greeted the destruction of Scollay Sq. as the herald of a bright future; Parisians wanted that bare steel monstrosity removed from Champ de Mars ASAP. Boston's present animus toward City Hall was matched or exceeded in all three cases; what makes you think that in 20 years Boston's regret won't match theirs too (or relief, in the case of Paris, which did think twice)? Don't come trumpeting the depth of your convictions, not because I disagree, but because everybody in NY, Boston and Paris was equally convinced at the time. How do you know you know better now?

Boston has had an architectural dry spell for four decades. The only lesson we learned from the disasters of urban renewal was to avoid boldness like the plague. Unfortunately, we did not discover the good taste to compensate. Is it wise, under such circumstances, to destroy a (potentially) great building, problematic but eminently fixable, in exchange for probable mediocrity?

justin
 
If you want to promote small-scale development, then you need to chop the land up into small parcels and sell them off one-by-one. It can be done. It's what should have been done with the T's and Turnpike Authority's Bulfinch Triangle land.
 
As I said, there is no sign of political will to do so.

justin
 
Question to those who understand City Hall. Do you think it would still work if it were preserved and then surrounded by small scale developments or does it need to be set apart and seen as a whole? In other words can we have our cake and eat it too?
 
I think it would work better as a complementary building rather than a stand alone. I love the views where it peeks out from behind the building on the corner of State and Congress. Looking down the Washington Mall at City Hall is a nice view too. It gives context to the building's texture that shows just how different and interesting it is, and does so without overwhelming you.
 
^^ Neat Idea! Can you add this:

kmp1284 said:
.... another idea I have thought of is the possibility of doing an air rights development over the pike at mass. ave behind 360 Newbury.
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It deserves better than "Other". Thanks.
 
That's the point!

I have nothing against tearing down buildings that don't work, and re-using the space. So what if City Hall didn't work, try something else. Move forward, instead of stagnating.

Preservationists feel otherwise, which is why we get stuck with crappy buildings.

Maybe we should start seeing buildings as temporary, instead of places that have to remain for hundreds of years (the Back Bay comes to mind).
 
Could you post the non-doctored version for comparison?

justin
 
http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid30255.aspx

How to save City Hall
Fight or blight?
By DAVID EISEN
December 20, 2006 6:42:02 PM

All too many Bostonians dismiss City Hall as a windswept monstrosity. They?re the same ones, undoubtedly, who hunger for a Norman Rockwell portrait of life in the Hub. But the heart of contemporary culture is more Picasso, De Kooning, and Arbus; and City Hall, with its warts-and-all facade, captures the complex and contradictory nature of our city as filtered through the equally brilliant minds of architects Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell.

Now comes Mayor Tom Menino?s proposal ? his second in eight years ? to build a new city hall on the South Boston waterfront and sell off the current building to developers, presumably for demolition. Beyond the questionable cost-benefit scenarios and concerns about public transportation, Menino?s attack on the building raises a larger question: what form should we give to our democratic institutions?

For better and for worse, the current City Hall is as honest and powerful a portrait of the modern metropolis and its government as we are ever likely to get. That familiar red brick out of which half of Boston is built warps upward to form a new and more aggressive foundation for the city. Towering concrete columns impose order on the sloping plaza, the Parthenon reinterpreted for the age of anxiety. The mayor?s office and Boston City Council chambers poke out in twisted compositions of opaque concrete and transparent glass ? doing contorted dances that suggest the nature of democracy in America. And floating above it all are the endless windows of the bureaucrats we rely on to make the city hum. It is a powerful evocation of who we are, not a paint-by-number image of what we would like to be.

There is real beauty in those sculptural forms and majestic spaces, and over the decades friendly critics have proposed a variety of therapeutic solutions for its worst features ? its dysfunctional plaza and cold interior ? which could unleash Government Center?s potential.



Hanover Street could be extended into the redbrick wasteland on one side, while a pedestrian bridge could cross over the congestion of Congress Street on the other to overcome the isolation that is one of the plaza?s real weaknesses. Adding water, greenery, and well-designed signage, as well as infilling the edges with activity-generating buildings might make it a place that connects rather than divides the city. That monolithic red-brick base could be opened up with shops and caf?s that would turn the fortress-like facade into something more inviting. And opening closed entries and ironing out the lumps and bumps in the plaza would reduce the cursing that accompanies a trip from the T stop to Quincy Market. Inside, wood, fabric, and better lighting could warm the building?s cold, hard heart and create more-inviting spaces. And where?s the beer garden that Kallmann and McKinnell envisioned spilling from the interior out to the plaza?

If Mayor Menino wants to leave a lasting legacy, it should come from improving the public realm, not selling it off to the highest bidder, only to encounter the same questions about the true face of our city on a more difficult site somewhere else.
 
There is no need for a pedestrian bridge across Congress Street. Such a bridge (at least in its originally proposed location) would block the views of Faneuil Hall and the Old State House from each other. Narrow this part of Congress Street to the same width it has south of State Street, and it will no longer be a major barrier to pedestrians.
 
To build a pedestrian bridge across Congress is essentially an act of submission. It says this stretch of Congress cannot be fixed and will continue to be inhospitable to pedestrians in perpetuity. I believe the contrary -- that it can and eventually will be tamed. It wont even be difficult, especially if City Hall ends up going to the Big Rubble Heap In The Sky.

Isn't it interesting that such a proposal is made in an article arguing for the preservation of City Hall? What he's saying basically is let's keep City Hall even though it means losing Congress Street forever.

Theres absolutely no reason whatsoever for this stretch of Congress to exist in its current state. It's simply piss-poor planning.
 
Continuing to reply to briv's interesting posts:
briv said:
Justin, I agree that Brutalism does share some of the same DNA with medieval architecture, particularly the Romanesque. I think Corbu was conscious of this when he designed la Tourette -- a monastery, which is a typology traditionally tied to the Romanesque. The Brutalists, however, seemed to be uninterested in harmonizing these massive forms like the Romanesque architects did. Just look at the monotonous staccato rhythm of City Hall's "windows". If architecture is frozen music, then the upper portion of City Hall is the petrified report of machine gun fire.
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So let's look at the building which symbolizes the American democracy the world over:
800px-The_Pentagon_US_Department_of_Defense_building.jpg

Oops, wrong picture... I meant this:
USCapitol.jpg

It's windows are just as regularly spaced as City Hall's: frozen musket fire, perhaps, with more ornate bullets? I find it a bit surprising that you're attacking the rhythm of CH's facade, which I find its strongest point. It's difficult, and misleading, to isolated the regular, 'bureaucratic' top of the building from the playful register below. Sticking to the musical metaphor, you can read the whole facade as a bar of rhythmic counterpoint: three lines of ostinato on top, a syncopated improvisation on the augmentation of the ostinato motif on the bottom:
CityHall.jpg

That picture also nicely shows that the brick is a bigger problem with City Hall than the concrete: notice that it's the blank brick that walls off what is basically quite a porous building from the plaza.
With Brutalism massiveness was an ends; cacophony was a rule. Furthermore, the human scale is rarely to be found in Brutalism architecture because vast continuos concrete forms have no points of reference.
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Cacophony is in the ear of the listener (and compositionally, CH is actually quite controlled). There are many things about CH you can object to, but lack of articulation isn't one of them.
I think another very important reason people react so harshly to Brutalism is the fact that the material, raw concrete, has the same gloomy color and texture as a rainy day.
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Have you been to Edinburgh? Your last sentence describes it to a tee, except the material is stone, And it is beautiful, though grim, orders of magnitude more so than CH could hope to be. I for one don't subscribe to the sugar and spice school of architecture. Massiveness and drama, if brought out appropriately, can captivate even Joe Sixpack.

And now that I have the picture of the Capitol building up, let me debunk once and for all that canard that government buildings must 'express' the democratic nature of politics they shelter by being transparent, welcoming etc. What does the shape of the US Capitol express? The main element, the dome, has a consistent history as the marker of high holy places, from the Pantheon via Hagia Sophia, Qubbat us-Sakhra, St. Peter's, St. Paul's to the other Pantheon. The portico and the long flight of steps reinforce the image of a temple, where Republican and Democratic high priests intercede on our behalf with the forces of history, mainly by sacrificing our tax money. Is that the image the seat of our democracy should project? Get me the wrecking ball right now!

A parting shot: hatred of City Hall; love of red brick; phobia of any building that soars over five stories; insistence on a park every two blocks: these are among the widely held architectural tastes in Boston. Yet some of the people here who hold the first item on this list to be the unassailable justification for dynamiting City Hall are the same ones bitching when the other three get in the way of development projects. Might I be forgiven for smelling a whiff of hypocrisy?

justin
 
the difference is that the capital building looks like a european model, whereas city hall looks like a dank crack hoe. :p :lol: :wink:
 
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