City Hall Plaza

vanshnookenraggen said:
I pray at least on of these proposals suggests infill buildings.
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Me too. But I predict grass - fancy grass, and maybe some trees.

**Edit: According to the article, the 'city documents' say we're looking for a "welcoming, loved front yard" ... so, grass it is.
 
I'm a little confused by the wording of the article. Are they saying design process will cost $500,000? Or is 500,000 the price for everything?
 
CSTH said:
Me too. But I predict grass - fancy grass, and maybe some trees.

**Edit: According to the article, the 'city documents' say we're looking for a "welcoming, loved front yard" ... so, grass it is.
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Obviously a few more tree lined areas. Grass.... Maybe a few small areas. Hopefully a redo of the large area which is interrupted by stairs every 30 feet and some functional design that goes along with the programming for the space. As much as the space is terribly inhuman most of the time, some of the time it is brilliant. Would be good to have an inviting place for hundreds of people for the 99% of the time and still retain the large plaza for those large special events for thousands.
 
CSTH said:
Me too. But I predict grass - fancy grass, and maybe some trees.

**Edit: According to the article, the 'city documents' say we're looking for a "welcoming, loved front yard" ... so, grass it is.
Click to expand...

My predictions:

- Grass
- Hardscaping
- <5% Shaded + tiny number of token saplings
- A few glorified kiosks.
 
Probably not unless they want to spend the extra money to rip up the entire thing and rebuild it. Supposedly it only worked a few times and leaked into the parking garage below.

If they could build a new one somewhere else that doesn't have that problem then that would be a win.
 
Uhhhh....

Boston Globe said:
50 years later, City Hall Plaza is cool

From its inception five decades ago, Boston’s City Hall Plaza was intended to be a hub of activity, with restaurants and areas to congregate. But that never came to be, leaving the sea of red brick in the heart of the city open to endless criticism and mockery. Along with City Hall itself, the plaza was voted into the Project for Public Spaces’ hall of shame for being “bleak, expansive, and shapeless.” Past attempts at transforming the plaza into a year-round attraction didn’t stick, but with the opening of Boston Winter in early December, the city may finally have figured it out.
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I'd like to see some grass. Right now its a big, hot, hard plaza, and It would be good to green it up a bit.
 
City Hall plaza was picked as the main host of HUBweek; 60 shipping containers and art installations, along with 4 geometric domes, celebrating science, art, and technology.
EDIT: Renders

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TheRifleman said:
The future platform for Mars living.
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Rifleman, this Mars concept has legs. The plaza is paved in red brick - got the color scheme correct. It's normally barren as hell - got the background amount of life correct. So they plunk down all these things that look like Mars colonization pods, then get one of those rover thingies from The Martian and hire local boy Matt Damon to drive it around giving tours while reprising his Mark Watney role.

And it's for Hub Week, and Boston is allegedly the hub of the universe, so why not an interplanetary theme?

If they ran with this, I'd be way more likely to buy tickets to some of the talks.
 
it seems the alt-right (some of them, anyway) can also be counted amongst those who dislike boston city hall (a "callous abomination... a public space so dismal that the winos don't even want to go there... a despotic building"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GapUEKYLE1o

(right around the 11:30 mark) a fairly interesting clip, whether you agree with the politics/philosophy driving the thing or not.
 
really wasn't meant as a political post. the lecturer discussing boston city hall (the section of the youtube clip i pointed to) didn't seem to be analyzing the building and surrounding space in political term. anyway -- if the post somehow offended, i apologize...
 
It's absurd to say someone is alt right simply because they dislike a brutalistic behemoth sitting on a vast superblock in the middle of downtown Boston.
 
The arguments presented aren't new & are rooted in absurd ideology. There are far better sources for architectural critiques than Infowars content.

Refer to CityLab article above.
 
Charlie_mta said:
It's absurd to say someone is alt right simply because they dislike a brutalistic behemoth sitting on a vast superblock in the middle of downtown Boston.
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the video is very clearly made by an alt-right media organization though. And the part relevant to Boston comes from an apolitical TED talk that could just as easily be linked to.

I would argue, the TED talk is silly as well, because it relies on a photo of an empty plaza, when I could just as easily show a photo of people sitting out enjoying the same plaza.
 
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If a vacuum is created in a high population city center, people will tend to use it as in the above photo. That kind of incidental patronage doesn't make it a wise and beneficial use of the land.

My experience on here of the critics of City Hall and GC in general is that they are not anti-modernist at all. I, like many others here, love modern architecture.

For me, it's not so much City Hall itself, it's the damned superblocks with vast plazas and wide highway-like streets that are really the abomination.
 
I think the mbta government center rehab somewhat improved that particular corner of the plaza. The redesign of Cambridge street however, seems to have made it less pedestrian friendly with the median removed.
 
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