Hurley Building Redevelopment | 19 Staniford St | West End

Dr. Rosen Rosen said:
Shouldn’t someone at this point standup for the beauty of brutalism?
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I get that you're likely referring to the cycle of discourse on aB and the inevitable few Hurley building fans among posters....but, oh the irony, it was precisely people standing up for brutalism that got us this disfigured frankenmess of the very brutalism they were trying to save. IIRC, wasn't it the Paul Rudolph Fan Club (sorry, forget the actual name of the group) who successfully petitioned to get some preservation requirements embedded in this call for proposals?

What I think would have worked much better here:
Preserve a few sculpture-like structural remnants such as how they just recently paid homage to the old elevated Green Line structure in Cambridge beneath the new GLX:

20220425_083455-jpg.23779

photo credit to @etik from the GLX thread here.

I could envision some structural remnants of the Hurley's corduroy concrete tastefully and artistically preserved here and there within and surrounded by an otherwise entirely new design.
 
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There's nothing else you can really expect if you're putting life science in. This could have been much more tastefully and thoughtfully done with any other kind of programming. The design requirements of the life science market will never complement a brutalist building.

This isn't an excuse for this proposal. I wouldn't call myself a fan in the slightest - its a real lazy excuse for preservation and satisfying the RFP/state and their investors.
 
Dr. Rosen Rosen said:
Shouldn’t someone at this point standup for the beauty of brutalism?
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Okay, I'll oblige.

Please, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. Really, no. Just no. Anything but this. WTF NO!?! C'mon, man. No.

Can't we get the peeps that did the Umass Dartmouth Library in to build something nice here? I mean, I get it. It's hard. Really inordinately hard, like way extra effort level hard to find that balance between old and new, preservation and practicality, finding some harmony in a way that makes sense on aesthetic and financial and cultural levels and all the rest. But shouldn't we at least try?

I dunno. I'm just going to feel sad if we end up with something like this.
 
atlantaden said:
As I’ve said several times before, call in the bulldozers, level that existing concrete monstrosity, and use that blank, level canvas to build something that Boston can be proud of!
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The above proposals have a "Frankenstein's Monster" quality. Not even lipstick on a pig. Pardon mixing metaphors...but in this case it's appropriate.
 
Holy Mother of God. What is this abortion of a design?
 
Dr. Rosen Rosen said:
Shouldn’t someone at this point standup for the beauty of brutalism?
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This iteration is embarrassing. No one who’s advocated for preservation via adaptive reuse has this in mind. Some may know, I’ve attended a handful of public meetings, spoken up, and submitted comments. Guess I’d better sharpen my pencil…

These added stumps are completely forgettable. Scrape them off like barnacles and toss them into Kendall Square, the South Boston Waterfront, or the Longwood Medical Area. Hurley is rigorous architecture, and it deserves an equally rigorous intervention, one that acknowledges its forms, materiality, and rhythm, but corrects its flaws through activation and openness. The right tall building here could be magical.

bene said:
Can't we get the peeps that did the Umass Dartmouth Library in to build something nice here? I mean, I get it. It's hard. Really inordinately hard, like way extra effort level hard to find that balance between old and new, preservation and practicality, finding some harmony in a way that makes sense on aesthetic and financial and cultural levels and all the rest. But shouldn't we at least try?
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Hurley needs Jeanne Gang, David Adjaye, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Antoine Predock, or Bjarke Ingels.
 
My knee-jerk reaction is this terrible. My one minute after reassessing reaction is that this is still terrible but maybe, if they can make the streetscape not suck somehow this won't be totally awful...

I hate it. I sort of knew this is what was coming down the pipeline. This is the kind of building architects can't resist, they don't want to destroy it because structurally it is unique, but they're also slaves to their developer's wallets and so we get this kind of fucked up proposal.

It's so bad.

BronsonShore said:
Jesus Christ, no one gives a shit about the housing crisis.
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This should have been obvious by now regardless. Talking about solving the housing crisis is easy and gets politicians elected. Actually solving it? Nobody in power actually wants to do that.
 
I stopped trying to convince people that "ugly" buildings are worth saving because most people can't get past the cover of a book. The discourse about architecture on this forum stopped a generation ago and now all people care about is how tall a new tower is. Architecture, everywhere, is dead. I can live with that (I'm ready for a rebirth). But what I can't live with is the blanket rejection of something.

Many of the historic buildings that are sacred in Boston have had many lives and been altered. That's a GOOD thing. It means that they have earned their place in history and are worth celebrating. So when I hear people talk about wanting to tear down any of these Brutalist buildings, I hear the same voices from 60 years ago who were calling for the wholesale demolition of everything they deemed ugly. Boston is unique in having a high concentration of literally the best examples of this era in the world. How are we not celebrating this?

Sure, these buildings are far from perfect. But that is a design challenge. This proposal has the basic ideas right, but the execution is terrible. This is a building that needs someone who understands its inner beauty to bring it out.
 
bigpicture7 said:
I could envision some structural remnants of the Hurley's corduroy concrete tastefully and artistically preserved here and there within and surrounded by an otherwise entirely new design.
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This is quite literally the worst thing that could happen. I've seen these facade-ectamies before and they are a slap in the face of architecture and historic preservation. It's the worst of both worlds. It also assumes that, in 2022, there is any serious architect that could replace this building with anything other than a jumbled mess of mediocrity.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
I stopped trying to convince people that "ugly" buildings are worth saving because most people can't get past the cover of a book. The discourse about architecture on this forum stopped a generation ago and now all people care about is how tall a new tower is. Architecture, everywhere, is dead. I can live with that (I'm ready for a rebirth). But what I can't live with is the blanket rejection of something.

Many of the historic buildings that are sacred in Boston have had many lives and been altered. That's a GOOD thing. It means that they have earned their place in history and are worth celebrating. So when I hear people talk about wanting to tear down any of these Brutalist buildings, I hear the same voices from 60 years ago who were calling for the wholesale demolition of everything they deemed ugly. Boston is unique in having a high concentration of literally the best examples of this era in the world. How are we not celebrating this?

Sure, these buildings are far from perfect. But that is a design challenge. This proposal has the basic ideas right, but the execution is terrible. This is a building that needs someone who understands its inner beauty to bring it out.
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Don’t you not even live in the city or area anymore?
 
guitarguynboston said:
Is that a putt putt golf course on the roof between the 2 ✌👊✌Towers✌👊✌???
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That would actually be really cool if it were, but alas, I highly doubt something even remotely creative is baked in to this proposal.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
So when I hear people talk about wanting to tear down any of these Brutalist buildings, I hear the same voices from 60 years ago who were calling for the wholesale demolition of everything they deemed ugly. Boston is unique in having a high concentration of literally the best examples of this era in the world. How are we not celebrating this?
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You mean the voices that tore down a beautiful, vibrant neighborhood to build this crap in the first place? How are the people explicitly calling to reverse their actions "the same"?

Those people... WERE WRONG. We understand that now, and what we think is ugly is the same thing people thought was ugly from the year zero to 1945 and from 1980 to 2022. This isn't cyclical, it was just a couple of decades when we lost our minds.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
I stopped trying to convince people that "ugly" buildings are worth saving because most people can't get past the cover of a book. The discourse about architecture on this forum stopped a generation ago and now all people care about is how tall a new tower is. Architecture, everywhere, is dead. I can live with that (I'm ready for a rebirth). But what I can't live with is the blanket rejection of something.

Many of the historic buildings that are sacred in Boston have had many lives and been altered. That's a GOOD thing. It means that they have earned their place in history and are worth celebrating. So when I hear people talk about wanting to tear down any of these Brutalist buildings, I hear the same voices from 60 years ago who were calling for the wholesale demolition of everything they deemed ugly. Boston is unique in having a high concentration of literally the best examples of this era in the world. How are we not celebrating this?

Sure, these buildings are far from perfect. But that is a design challenge. This proposal has the basic ideas right, but the execution is terrible. This is a building that needs someone who understands its inner beauty to bring it out.
Click to expand...
Yes and no. Stewart Brand has an excellent dichotomy of buildings into "high road" of flexible, high concept architecture and "low road" of cheap, reusable, and easily replaceable buildings. The problem, as he details, is that starting around the early 20th century, the flexibility of traditional architectural forms allowing relatively easy reuse and adaptation of even the most high end buildings basically disappeared. This is very clear with buildings like City Hall and the Hurley. I agree we should reuse and build on historic buildings, that's tradition in the best way. The problem is these buildings that were designed to prevent any of that. We shouldn't build like that ever again and the cost of adaptation seems not at all worth the value here.
 
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