Hurley Building Redevelopment | 19 Staniford St | West End

What building is this? Is this the building from the movie Scanners? I have been trying to figure out what that is forever.
Drag and dropping the picture into Google's image search reveals:
House of Soviets, Kaliningrad.

All's that's missing is the through-the-center monorail,

which, of course, is what's missing from the Hurley too.

Putting this gem (and a russian-langage blog page of it) in the Ode to Brutalism thread
 
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Dynamite the Hurley and let's build something civil and humane,

with a gd observation deck 10' below the FAA crown this time,
as opposed to a privatized rug pulled out from under us.

I don't know how I feel about this, and I'll have to become more familiar with the building as most of the time I am drawn away by the chain link fences and general coldness of the area....
i so much wanna say, "you just said how you feel about this..."
But then i'd be leading the witness....
Yeah, i'm enjoying this.... :)
 
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How can they build a 800ft tower here... when the zoning only permits 400ft in a small section of it?
 
I dunno, everyone on here defending this building seem to be suggesting ways to make it work for the 21st century.
If it was well designed, we wouldn't need to do this.
So going against it,
- It needs major updating to be practical
- it's expensive to maintain
- It divides the neighborhood
- In it's self it's a poor use of space
- It's not the finished product that was originally invisaged
- It harks back to a very questionable time in Boston development.

Going for it.
- In this age of bottom line design, it's different and interesting.

I think it's a bit unfair to lambast people who want to see it gone, especially considering a portion of the complex will remain and it would need to be modified anyway.
 
I just heard the news and came here expecting a chorus of lamentations, only to see that the vast majority of posters want to see it nuked into orbit. Interesting...

Having taken a moment to digest all this, I'll just say I fully recognize that this thing is 1) NOT everyone's cup of tea, 2) was birthed out of an era with horribly misguided notions of tEh fUTuRe, and 3) the best bit of it won't be going away just yet, so I can tell my heart to stop beating so damn fast.

But what I find myself lamenting first and foremost is that the thing(s) that will replace it, while almost certainly being better urbanistically, will have a 99.9999999% chance of being total architectural garbage. It'd be one thing if this were the 1980s or the Starchitect era and there was at least the POTENTIAL for something that actually tried to do well, a la Rowes Wharf, but the current development scene dictates that actual design merit is worth nothing to the bottom line and thus is completely irrelevant. Rowes Wharf may not be for everyone, but I think it's clear that someone somewhere gave at least half a damn.

Secondly, I think any discussions of redeveloping this site should include reconsidering the roads around it as a prerequisite. FK4, who apparently is the only member of this board that interacts with it on any regular basis, said this which I think bears repeating:

....the horrible experience of the roads themselves, all being many lanes too wide. And to here people arguing that replacing this one building, with what I absolutely know is going to be another thoughtless, architectural turd, is actually going to make that much difference — or that there are not actual alternatives to that one single plan that could make an equivalent, if not superior, difference — I do find that to be narrowminded.

Many years ago, I was a bike messenger zipping every which way through the city, and within the downtown area this zone in particular always stood out as a hostile shitshow to navigate. If we're going to discuss how this building is an abomination of urban planning and that it's time for it to go, then we need to be discussing these renewal-era roadways as well. Bowdoin, Staniford, New Chardon -- I'm looking squarely at you. At the very least, some traffic calming measures should be a part of the package deal.

Now having said that, I know the State is running the show and will probably bungle the process with the most hamfisted maneuvering possible, and that good architecture or road design will only get the lip service treatment at best, and it's for this exact reason that I have a lot of reluctance to seeing this news break. I personally love how this building looks (and I'm not even that gaga over brutalism as a whole), so to imagine some Seaport-style glass boxes standing on some Seaport Boulevard-style roads is a really hard pill to swallow. This area needs a holistic rethinking that I just know won't be met by this RFP.

Edit: I'm a bit confused over what heights and FAR is allowed here, in which case I'm not trying to set up a straw man by saying Seaport glass boxes are the only options here.
 
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I don't know whether they are structurally distinct, but if nothing else, you should not be able to access one from the other. The Lindemann is a secure facility as it was designed to include inpatient mental health care services. I'm not sure that any inpatient care continues at this time, but originally it was a significant aspect of how that building was used.
No inpatient units here for many years... but the good news is they’ve cleared out plenty of patients and filled in the space with offices for DMH bureaucrats... let’s not forget who DMH actually exists for.

Aside from that, there are a couple DMH homeless shelters here, some group homes, and a clinic.
 
This site is up 5, 10 or 15 years too early.
It will end up you know how many feet when it should of gone
you know how many feet.
 
But what I find myself lamenting first and foremost is that the thing(s) that will replace it, while almost certainly being better urbanistically, will have a 99.9999999% chance of being total architectural garbage. It'd be one thing if this were the 1980s or the Starchitect era and there was at least the POTENTIAL for something that actually tried to do well, a la Rowes Wharf, but the current development scene dictates that actual design merit is worth nothing to the bottom line and thus is completely irrelevant. Rowes Wharf may not be for everyone, but I think it's clear that someone somewhere gave at least half a damn.

That's dependent on how much money there is and how much will the developer has. Your profile pic is the Treehouse, which gave a damn and looks great. The new Volpe, developed under similar circumstances, has been designed cohesively and intentionally and will look great. One Congress, a similar project a block away from this, will look great.

The reason there are glass boxes in the Seaport is because of the 200' height limit imposed by the airport, and because it's effectively a Convention Center/airport hotel district. The Bulfinch Triangle area has One Congress and Hub on Causeway, both of which generally look good, even if some people are pissed off by the HonC's towers.

Secondly, I think any discussions of redeveloping this site should include reconsidering the roads around it as a prerequisite. FK4, who apparently is the only member of this board that interacts with it on any regular basis, said this which I think bears repeating:.

I'm not sure why you think the rest of us don't spend time around this building. I do. I agree with you completely. Traffic calming was part of the package at Bulfinch Crossing and along Binney Street in Kendall, and it should be here too. I believe the City of Boston is working on (and MassDOT/MBTA have endorsed) the Congress Street BRT that would run down these roads and take 2 lanes.

Edit: I'm a bit confused over what heights and FAR is allowed here, in which case I'm not trying to set up a straw man by saying Seaport glass boxes are the only options here.

The only height limit that matters in Boston is the one set by the FAA, which has 825' for this site. The City of Boston's zoning height doesn't matter - it's set low on purpose to force developers to grovel before the "representatives of the people" if they want to build big. I haven't looked for sure, but I assume Bulfinch Crossing/One Congress, the Garden Garage, and Hub on Causeway all exceed zoning height for their locations by hundreds of feet.

I'd say the model here is less Seaport and more Bulfinch Crossing. That's a hard comparison because a lot of that project hasn't actually been designed yet.


No new information, but the headline provides a look into how the news is being received by the architecture community.

Unless the members of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation live in Boston, I don't really care what they think we should do with our city.
 

No new information, but the headline provides a look into how the news is being received by the architecture community.

Sounds about right. As an aside, the photo they used (which is almost entirely of the not-to-be-touched Lindemann) provides a good visual of where the Lindemann ends and the Hurley begins.
 
Rather than destroying it, they should be calling Bruner/Cott or designLAB in to add some glass and do a strategic reworking of the ground level spaces ala BU Law Tower (Sert) or UMD Carney Library (Rudolph) to enhance the characteristics of the brutalism, rather than erase them. There ARE ways to make brutalism work in 2019 that celebrate the original form.

I want to believe, but I just don't see it. Maybe if somebody would sketch the fix, I'd find it easier to believe in.

Here's why I don't think it would work:

1) Both the BU tower and the UMD Library worked/work as mid-century "art object" buildings dotted onto a campus. They didn't have to do or create a streetscape.
2) As isolated campus buildings, they basically just had to fix the entrances and didn't have to violate the use or design of the rest of the building. The buildings could still be what they were designed to be and mostly keep saying what they were designed to say.
3) Hurley's whole purpose seems to be turn up-and-away from the street--not just a little bit (as a Frank Lloyd Wright building might put its streetside windows up high), but every darn inch of it--as if every sweater-snagging piller-vane was a razor-wire-studded middle finger to the street. Like City Hall (but unlike Pei's Christian Science Colonade) it asserts "Dearest Neighbors, I'm here, but I reject you as unclean"

And worse, it does it right up to the edge of the sidewalk. City Hall Plaza at least offers some margin of error within in which fixes can be implemented (similar to the campus buildings)

You could put 1980s-style greehouse boxes all over the front--make it look like the Javits Center--but I don't see how that'd be "preservation" or "adaptive reuse"

To redeem it, you'd have to embed it so thick in "Not Rudolph" that it'd be like saying that NY Penn Station had essentially been preserved because the track layout is still there.
 
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I'm coming around to tearing down the Hurley today. The initial shock has worn off. The Lindemann is more architecturally significant anyway, imho. We get some density/housing, restored grid (hopefully), mixed uses, active streetscape and we still get to appreciate the Lindemann.

I'd be more willing to fight if it were the whole complex being torn down, but it's not.
 
^ But are you saying "no" to its demolition or its preservation?
 
How did the concrete get the "shard corduroy" finish (that I hate so much)?
 
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I'll let my friend Don Logan speak for me:

Even though they plan on keeping half of it? (what most people are saying is the better half) I mean, I certainly do like the funky staircases, but the absolutely deadening presence this has in the overall urban fabric is undeniable.

I wish they would do something about this bleeping parking lot, fenced off from the city.
 
Even though they plan on keeping half of it? (what most people are saying is the better half) I mean, I certainly do like the funky staircases.....
Would it even pass code, today?
 

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