Re: Menino Proposes Selling City Hall
Hub planners envision more vibrant City Hall
By Thomas Grillo
Thursday, December 9, 2010 - Updated 3 hours ago
Boston?s Government Center Plaza, reviled as an eyesore for decades, could be transformed into an oasis where skaters could frolic, cosmopolitan strollers could sip cocktails and tourists could find relief under leafy glades, according to one architect speaking on the eve of a City Hall brainstorming forum.
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1301895
?There?s nothing pleasant or comfortable about Government Center Plaza today. Let?s get rid of the brick, line the edges with trees and kiosks and make it a place where people want to visit,? said Bill Taylor of Boston landscape architecture firm Carol R. Johnson Associates, which designed Chinatown Park on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway.
Taylor spoke as a group of architects plan to gather today at a public ?Greening Government Center? symposium organized by the Menino administration and the Boston Redevelopment Authority intended to reimagine the barren, windswept plaza.
?The mayor has made it very clear to me and the design team that he doesn?t want this to be a plan that sits on the shelf,? said James Hunt, the city?s chief of environmental and energy services. ?He wants to see some low-cost and implementable improvements to the public realm.?
Taylor, who will not be on today?s panel, suggests:
? Adding an ice skating rink ? like the one at Rockefeller Center ? with a below-grade restaurant
? Wrapping the plaza with a grove of trees
? Adding restaurants, cafes and a beer garden
? Creating a contemporary mini Public Garden
?It has to be a purposeful destination that people want to bring their kids to,? Taylor said while touring the plaza with a Herald reporter. ?It?s important that we design this to be the capital of New England.?
That was always the idea, said one of the plaza?s original planners.
?It?s a tragedy. We imagined a green space with grass, trees and paths ? a smaller version of the Boston Common,? said Henry Cobb, an author of the 1961 Government Center master plan by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects LLP in New York. Cobb said the early plan was for a much smaller building with a larger open space similar to Boston Common.
But Back Bay architect Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles settled on the controversial Brutalist building with its vast brick plaza ? a design hailed by many at the time as cutting-edge, but treated with increasing disdain in ensuing decades. The firm did not return calls seeking comment.
Now, city officials see a rare opportunity to remake the plaza next year in the wake of the MBTA?s planned face-lift of the Government Center T Station.
The city?s goal is to devise low-cost improvements that can be implemented in 2011. And architects are welcoming the chance.
?Whether you love it or hate it, City Hall is a building of architectural significance,? said Janet Marie Smith, a former Fenway Park [map] architect, who will be on today?s panel. ?But the plaza never reaches full potential unless there?s activity ? like the celebration of a World Series victory ? so it?s a real challenge to make it work for those civic events as well as for day-to-day life.?
City Hall makeover:
