Greening Government Center, part two

briv

briv

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Mayor Menino hosts the Second Symposium on the Greening of Government Center on Monday, February 7, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm at the Modern Theatre (523-525 Washington St., Boston). Free and open to the public, the symposium features Utile and Reed Hilderbrand Associates, who lead the redesign, followed by a panel of design experts including Alex Krieger FAIA of Chan Krieger NBBJ and Ted Landsmark Assoc. AIA of Boston Architectural College. Find more details on Facebook.
 
I'll probably swing by and check this out. Is this about putting trees on City Hall Plaza or whatever?

Anyone want me to loudly lobby for development and street grid?
 
BostonUrbEx said:
I'll probably swing by and check this out. Is this about putting trees on City Hall Plaza or whatever?

Anyone want me to loudly lobby for development and street grid?
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How about you lobby to extend Hanover Street across Congress Street and City Hall Plaza to connect with Cambridge Street. That partially restores the grid. After than, how would you feel about lobbying to have this idea for a New Boston City Hall built?
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Does this idea look good?
 
I've seen that project and the campanille is just overkill. This is not Venice.
 
That's like someone offering you 10 billion dollars and saying "I can't take that! I'm not Bill Gates!"
 
I don't personally support the demolishing of City Hall at all. I think that we can successfully activate the plaza with the proper greening, shading, etc without tearing down that beautiful building.

Everyone on here is always complaining about how Boston is stuck in the past, well this proposal would take us back hundreds of years!
 
To when we knew how to build cities...
 
I'm all for looking to the past for CONCEPTS and PLANNING (thank you history of arch I and II), but building a replica of the State House as city hall in 2011 is just absurd. It's an insult to Boston, its people, and its progressivism. It's too literal. We should learn from Venice and Sienna, but we shouldn't copy it. Heck, IM Pei designed City Hall Plaza to mimic an Italian one. It just didn't quite work out because the usage wasn't optimal/the development that was supposed to happen did not. Now we need to restore its planned purpose and make it work in the modern age.
 
I don't know why everyone is raging about this proposal. Perhaps if we lost the clock tower, would it be better?
 
NJBostonFan said:
I don't know why everyone is raging about this proposal. Perhaps if we lost the clock tower, would it be better?
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No, it wouldn't be any better. The completely gimmicky city hall building is what bothers me the most. I would be fine if that exact city hall was built in 1700 and that is how the plaza looked historically, but that is not how you design for 2011.
 
datadyne007 said:
No, it wouldn't be any better. The completely gimmicky city hall building is what bothers me the most. I would be fine if that exact city hall was built in 1700 and that is how the plaza looked historically, but that is not how you design for 2011.
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Well, can it be designed for 2011?
 
I am ready to share my vision, and I propose to use the layout of the proposal i showed, but I want the entire buildings in the new complex to be all glass. Everything in clear glass, making the building very open. An extremely high tech and green design. That's what I want to put there.
 
datadyne007 said:
I'm all for looking to the past for CONCEPTS and PLANNING (thank you history of arch I and II), but building a replica of the State House as city hall in 2011 is just absurd. It's an insult to Boston, its people, and its progressivism. It's too literal. We should learn from Venice and Sienna, but we shouldn't copy it. Heck, IM Pei designed City Hall Plaza to mimic an Italian one. It just didn't quite work out because the usage wasn't optimal/the development that was supposed to happen did not. Now we need to restore its planned purpose and make it work in the modern age.
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My point was that the concept & planning of the of that diagram is far and away better than the concept & planning of what is there now. People get too hung up on style. You can build that concept in any style you want, brutalism, Neo-classical, POMO, Art Deco, post-art nouveau-deconstructivist-industrial - it doesn't matter. As long as it creates a cohesive, pedestrian friendly, human-scaled urban environment. That's all I care about.
 
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statler said:
My point was that the concept & planning of the of that diagram is far and away better than the concept & planning of what is there now. People get too hung up on style. You can build that concept in any style you want, brutalism, Neo-classical, POMO, Art Deco, post-art nouveau-deconstructivist-industrial - it doesn't matter. As long as it creates a cohesive, pedestrian friendly, human-scaled urban environment. That all I care about.
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Yes, I completely agree with that. The execution and layout is beautiful. With the way this has been constantly thrown around the internet, it worried me that people actually wanted the buildings to look like that (and I know that some actually do).
 
My biggest concern with trying to build something like that today is that you won't end up with something that really looks like that. Modern construction techniques rely on too many short cuts and cheap materials. It will never have the real grandeur of a building true to that age.
That said I don't really buy into the 'false history' argument. A beautiful building is a beautiful building. It doesn't matter when it was built.
 
statler said:
My point was that the concept & planning of the of that diagram is far and away better than the concept & planning of what is there now. People get too hung up on style. You can build that concept in any style you want, brutalism, Neo-classical, POMO, Art Deco, post-art nouveau-deconstructivist-industrial - it doesn't matter. As long as it creates a cohesive, pedestrian friendly, human-scaled urban environment. That's all I care about.
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Me too.
 
Anybody else go?

Will scan and post my notes in a moment, and have a couple pictures from the slides, too.
 
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