In defense of Boston

[Jasonik]

Well the perfect architect to do it is the 2006 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureate, Brazilian Paulo Mendes da Rocha.

 

[ablarc]

Rather than whine about how the mouth-breathers don't "get it", why don't you explain exactly what makes this building so great? ?Educate more, bitch less...

Sheesh, statler, you really know how to make a guy feel guilty.

And now I?m getting homework assignments.

Do it in a way that even the knuckle-draggers can understand.

Figments of your imagination.

I'm really trying to like this building.

Good for you.

Some things are hard to like unless you make an effort. Examples are opera, caviar, Gertrude Stein, Zen Buddhism, James Joyce, cilantro, Garcia Lorca, twelve-tone music, Immanuel Kant, Jorge Luis Borges, twelve-tone music for the umpteenth time, Jackson Pollock, foie gras, frog?s legs, tripe, brains, oysters, Steve Reich, Kasimir Malevich, Michelangelo Antonioni, Leonard Cohen and Brutalist architecture. All acquired tastes.

You've already convinced me it should be saved but nobody has done a good job of explaining why.

Explaining is hard for the same reason most folks don?t bother with understanding: you have to rack your brains, and that?s work. It?s easier to just dismiss it. The list above contains difficult food ingredients and difficult human achievements. By definition, the difficult human achievements took intellectual rigor to create and they take the same faculty to grasp.

Most folks who throw in the towel a few pages into Finnegan?s Wake don?t really dare dismiss Joyce, coz they?ve heard he?s deep. They read on the Net that literary critics think Ulysses the greatest novel of the English language, and they?re not about to put in the effort to see if that?s true. So they leave it at that.

More folks feel free to diss, say, Wagner without making any real effort to see where he?s coming from; the fat sopranos provide them with a cheap shot --even as doubts may linger about whether they got it right.

But most of us have heard we?re all experts in architecture; after all, we spend most of our time in it.

Don?t you believe it !

Few of us go anywhere near any real architecture most days, just as most of what we read isn?t literature. Architecture is not synonymous with buildings, and most buildings aren?t architecture.

Architecture is rarefied artistic rigor applied to making a building. This means dreaming up a unified and meaningful whole. All works of art are that; they hang together.

I design forty or fifty buildings per annum, and most years not one of them qualifies as architecture. Most clients not only don?t want architecture, but if they catch an inkling of what it is they actively loathe it. And well they should, because it can?t possibly serve their purposes unless they?re already looking for it, for architecture is never just utilitarian; even the Bauhaus is anything but that.

Confronted with the prospect of architecture, most clients wisely recoil in horror, knowing it will alter their habits, demand maintenance and understanding, may expose them to their peers? ridicule or censure, will leak and make them hot or cold, and likely lighten their wallets. Architecture is much too risky; anyone who really wants it already has a somewhat masochistic devotion to art. These folks are rare and easily identified.

City Hall is a collection of fat sopranos.

Once you get into its conceptual reality, you won?t just like it; you?ll love it. Did you ever meet a lukewarm opera buff?

Mostly it's just "because I said so" or empty platitudes about how powerful and bold the building is.

I?ll spare you that because you can see it for yourself,

But since I have to design buildings myself I can reveal a little about how hard it must have been to juggle all the components of City Hall so they hang together as an artistic whole.

The fancy term for this is tectonics, which the dictionary says is the science or art of assembling, shaping, or ornamenting materials in construction.

In keeping with their Modernist predilections and their minimalist leanings, Kallmann and McKinnell made their art out of the science. The question was: how much compositional interest would emerge from the rigorous and correct application of a very small number of rules and their intersection with the nature of the narrow spectrum of building materials chosen. Like Mies: they believed that less is more, but not so little it?s a bore.

Their building?s tectonic components are the structural and mechanical systems, and there?s precious little else to this building (except glass infill where the structure isn?t). The structural materials are brick and two kinds of concrete: poured-in-place and precast, which has a different nature.

And here?s a surprise: in their reductionist zeal, they made the upper levels? structure double as the mechanical system. Concrete ducts !! You can see them clamber up the building?s outside; that?s what those massive cement fins are that function ?decoratively? at the upper levels, like colossal dentil molding. Simultaneously they serve as the building?s structure and enclosure. To synthesize, to hang together, to do more with less.

?I like an arch,? replied the brick, when Louis Kahn famously inquired what it wanted. That wasn?t the answer Kallmann and McKinnell wanted to hear; as card carrying Modernists, they knew arches were verboten. So they relegated brick to their building?s lower realms, where it wasn?t required to make openings (something it does pure and correct without steel only as an arch). Earthbound, it became a metaphor for terra firma, a role confirmed by organic fusion with the vast brick plaza, and by the literal fact that brick is clay.

From mother earth spring foursquare geysers of once-fluid concrete: congealed, they?re cement sequoias, at once lofty, sturdy and as differentiated as individual trees in a forest. These are the mainframes both literally and figuratively of the entire civic structure. They hold up the building, they link earth to sky, at the entrance they greet you with soaring sylvan monumentality onto which you can project your civic pride in Boston?s virtuous government or feel oppressed by its corruption and bureaucracy: the same forms will serve for either, the choice is yours.

From here, space corkscrews heavenward past cantilevered council chambers, elevator shafts, monumental stairs and a now bunkerish mayor?s office that you could freely visit in happier days. Like the brick below, all this poured beton brut reminds of Rome?s identical brick and concrete building technology: solid, compressive, imperial, built for the ages, and susceptible to barbarians.

Here also may lie the building?s symbolic weakness, for on top of all this poured monumentality and upbeat symbolism lie draped like wet blankets: three layers of precast bureaucracy! O, parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

Oh, it gives those folks a view who are confined there all day. But mostly it gives you the completed composition that was this entire building?s formal impetus from the get-go: an inverted-pyramid composition motivated by a desire to depict. In Venturi?s terms it?s a duck, for this building is actually a thinly disguised sculpture, a statue of ? another building! And that building is the Monastery of LaTourette.

So there you have it, another layer of symbolism: City Hall as monastery . Or perhaps you?d prefer: City Government as inverted pyramid . Or would you care for Topheavy Government ?

The fact that the top is precast is brilliant, because precast is the next logical progression in the structural evolution of masonry as you go up light to the sky and forward in history. Industrialized factory construction allows a uniform and standardized module, and steel reinforcement permits an almost gossamer lightness in the context of this building?s otherwise pachydermal ambiance. Mechanical systems are threaded through the gaps, and lighting courses through the lower chords in a marvel of integrated design.

What to a layman seem clunky beams with rectangular gaps register as elegant Vierendel trusses to an engineer, supported correctly at their fifth points, ends cantilevered. The panel points of these supports are conveyed downward as columns or transfer beams to the lower floors, which therefore acquire the exact and regular modular order of their upper brethren, like a drumbeat but with contrapuntal improvisations. A tour-de-force of spatial ordering that fully integrates the building, like writing a business letter in iambic pentameter.

Did someone say ?cantilever?? Why that?s a thematic subtext throughout this building, where all outside corners are cantilevered and all three upper floors are corbelled (cantilevered) outward from the floor below. Structure in the service of massing. Like writing an iambic-pentameter business letter in which now all the sentences rhyme.

I don?t know if the proportioning and dimensioning is done according to the Modulor (Golden Section) as in Corbu?s original of which this is a formally structured set of improvised variations, but if it is that?s like adding yet another layer of integrating formal order, infinitely subtle, like making each sentence in the business letter start with a letter in an acronym.

Does all this matter? What is it really but a shameless display of virtuoso skill and intellectual rigor? Even fuller of artifice -- to those who can see them-- than Vermeer?s little optical highlights or Mozart?s abrupt forays into minor keys. Does it matter that Beethoven?s Fifth Symphony is all organized ?macro and micro-- out of a pattern of four notes? Does that make it better than if it were pleasant melodic noodling? Does it matter that the iconography of a Gothic portal may reveal prophetic secrets of the Book of Daniel? Does it matter that the juggler finally figured out how to add a seventh twirling plate? Would it matter if the complete discography of Max Roach vanished tomorrow? Does it matter? Of course not.

What use, after all, is art when we can replace it with profit ?especially if we can simultaneously declare it ugly and have most folks murmur agreement. And what, oh what can be done with a building with dirty concrete, bad heat and a bad rap?

I can?t tell you if Boston City Hall is ugly, because to me the question is meaningless. Maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder. All I know is I don?t have the brainpower or the creative inventiveness to pull off something simultaneously so tightly organized and formally varied in a million years of trying. So difficult?

Maybe we could respect that. Others have in the past.



One way to measure the importance of something is by how much else it has affected, and you can gauge something?s effects by the number of its imitators. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Boston City Hall has been much admired.

City Hall?s imitators are everywhere. Charlotte has two. One is a college classroom building, another is the Charlotte Observer.

Dallas has at least one. ?And it?s the City Hall !!

Boston doesn?t have an imitation of Dallas? City Hall. Dallas has an imitation of Boston?s City Hall.

An exterior whose exterior expression is composed entirely of its structure and its mechanical system: do you recognize the schema of the Pompidou Center?

An architect who tells you he?s not influenced by other architects is a liar. For about fifteen years, Boston?s City Hall influenced more building designs than any new building on the planet. And Boston has the original !!

Boston can be proud.

* * *

You?re a hard man, Statler; my feet are all charred.

I thank you.




However:

" You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

...Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs!"

.

 

[Ron Newman]

That's beautiful writing ... but it fails to address the issue of a building that doesn't work for its intended purpose. It may be great sculpture but it's not functional, and functional is more important for a building that is supposed to serve the public.

 

[cityrecord]

That's beautiful writing ... but it fails to address the issue of a building that doesn't work for its intended purpose. It may be great sculpture but it's not functional, and functional is more important for a building that is supposed to serve the public.

I hear this criticism of City Hall all the time, but I'm never quite sure what people mean by it. How does City Hall not work for its intended purpose? What is its intended purpose?

 

[DudeUrSistersHot]

Ablarc, you've convinced me that City Hall is a marvel of architecture and engineering and that we should be proud of the fact that Boston was the first.

So that's cool. Now, let's knock the useless, ugly piece of crap down and build a real City Hall.

 

[ablarc]

That's beautiful writing ... but it fails to address the issue of a building that doesn't work for its intended purpose. It may be great sculpture but it's not functional, and functional is more important for a building that is supposed to serve the public.

I hear this criticism of City Hall all the time, but I'm never quite sure what people mean by it. How does City Hall not work for its intended purpose? What is its intended purpose?

There are two separate issues: should City Hall's functions be moved, and should city hall be destroyed.

Answer to first question: Let the mayor and others decide. They seem to want to do this for fiscal reasons and to get a nice new building with heat that works. Nothing wrong with that; that?s exactly what Collins did when he abandoned the French Empire City Hall on School Street, which was then at the nadir of Beaux-Arts popularity. Its interior was redone, and it now functions fine as commercial office space with a restaurant. Meanwhile its architectural style has come back into fashion.

Answer to second question: Don?t under any circumstances tear down City Hall, but sell it to a developer together with the plaza and the stipulation that City Hall can?t be mutilated. Redo its interior for the BAC, a museum, office space, a nifty restaurant or whatever else seems desirable. Redevelop the vasty expanses of the plaza with three or four skyscrapers and some smaller buildings on a dense grid of narrow streets. By the time you?re done with that, City Hall?s architectural style will have come back into fashion.

Boston will have two former City Halls. If the new one is architecturally distinguished, in time there will be three.

As for function: form is completely independent of it. Custom House is a fine hotel that used to be an outmoded federal office building, Chickering Piano Factory became apartments, Batterymarch Offices became a hotel, McLauthlin Elevator Factory became condos, countless warehouses became apartments, offices, a children?s museum and multi-story shopping malls. Any building can be made functional for some purpose if it?s redone.

A general rule: you shouldn't destroy art.

 

[Ron Newman]

One difference from all of those examples: those buildings were functional for their original purposes; later, those purposes became outdated and the buildings were reused for something else. Was City Hall ever truly functional?

Sometimes a building should not be adapted and reused. The Government Center Garage had office space added to it a few years ago, but that now just makes it harder to correct the original mistake, which was putting it up in the first place.

 

[Merper]

?

my question to you Ablarc, is does 'fixing' city hall ruin the art?

I mean, take the Congress St. side, does replacing blank brick walls with storefronts (desireable in my opinion) take away from the "poetry" of the original structure? Does redoing the interiors to resemble more 'normal' buildings make the art any less desireable? Does having ivy growing on the large brick sidewalls miss the point?

I happen to like City Hall, but like its detractors, I do beleive it needs to be fixed (and any of my previous suggestions would help). And just like the repurposed buildings you mentioned, I don't see why the same couldn't be done with City Hall.

For starters, it would make for a much more dignified home to a "Boston Museum" than the ridiculous Safdie proposal for the greenway. Probably cost just about as much to fix City Hall than to construct that monstrosity anyways.

 

[PerfectHandle]

One difference from all of those examples: those buildings were functional for their original purposes; later, those purposes became outdated and the buildings were reused for something else. Was City Hall ever truly functional?

That's the wrong question. Whether City Hall is functional as is is beside the point if you're going to remove its current function. What matters is whether it will be able to perform another function. I think the answer is yes. Given some investment, City Hall will function very well as a museum, a school, office space or whatever else. You may disagree with me on that point, but to doom it because of past non-functionality is absurd and stupid.

 

[PerfectHandle]

Because I think it'll be great to be able to find all City Hall discussions down the road, maybe this discussion belongs in the City Hall thread.

 

[ablarc]

Re: ?

my question to you Ablarc, is does 'fixing' city hall ruin the art?

Nah, and the original architects would agree. They'tell you they made such a strong armature that it'll survive all kinds of interventions with integrity.

I mean, take the Congress St. side, does replacing blank brick walls with storefronts (desireable in my opinion) take away from the "poetry" of the original structure?

Shoulda done that to begin with, but in those days suburban zoning ideas ruled --and that included separation of functions. Check out Christopher Columbus Plza (North End waterfront) for another project that could have (should have) hosted ground floor stores if not specifically banned by the authorities.

Does redoing the interiors to resemble more 'normal' buildings make the art any less desireable?

Don't have to do that. Building lends itself admirably to "creative" treatment.

Does having ivy growing on the large brick sidewalls miss the point?

It's a great idea. Ivy enhances most buildings. Both Harvard and Yale looked better when they had more of it.

For starters, it would make for a much more dignified home to a "Boston Museum" than the ridiculous Safdie proposal for the greenway. Probably cost just about as much to fix City Hall than to construct that monstrosity anyways.

Emphatically agreed !

 

[Ron Newman]

Christopher Columbus Park is not very large. Where would you have put storefronts there?

I like it the way it is, as a small green open space next to the water. In warm weather months it is well-used. I'd like to see more concerts there.

 

[ablarc]

Christopher Columbus Park is not very large. Where would you have put storefronts there?

Ground floor of the elderly housing, all the way around. Big granite building next door has had them for years, but idiotically facing inward to a boring mall. More mistakes of the Seventies.

 

[Ron Newman]

Elderly housing? Which building is that? The only building that actually adjoins Christopher Columbus Park is the Marriott Long Wharf Hotel. The park's other edges are Atlantic Avenue and the water.

[Edit: I suppose Joe's American Grill technically adjoins the park, too.]

 

[ablarc]

Christopher Columbus Plaza Housing for the Elderly (1977), occupies the entire block bounded by Commercial Street, Commercial Wharf, Richmond Street and Atlantic Avenue.

Easy to miss because it blends like a mouse. North End said: make it red brick.

 

[Ron Newman]

Oops! Totally different place from the park I was talking about (though only a block away). Nevermind.

 

[Merper]

a little TLC can go a long way....

why not?

 

[Jasonik]

a little TLC can go a long way....

why not?

All this brick stuff was added on anyways, not part of the original vision. I think the structure would retain it's integrity if all the brick walls, ramps etc were removed for some nice glass like the Ford Foundation building by Roche Dinkeloo (1967).

 

[Scott]

For starters, it would make for a much more dignified home to a "Boston Museum" than the ridiculous Safdie proposal for the greenway. Probably cost just about as much to fix City Hall than to construct that monstrosity anyways.

Yes, it would make a good museum.

In the 1970's when this building was still new there was such a thing as Little City Hall's like the one in Mattapan Sq, City Hall has never been completely functional from the day it was built so we cannot contend that it was just a lack of maintenance. I don't think we should tear it down but it isn't financially responsible for it to continue as the seat of local government..

 

[IMAngry]

Question about renovation

Is it possible to save the facade, but renovate inside? Would that be okay with anyone / everyone? I'm thinking the typical renovation such as the Hearst Tower, in NYC. I am not a fan of that kind of construction, but if it allows a developer the chance to buy and build, would it be worth it?

The existing structure is terrible, inside. It is terrible. You can't get anywhere, and it's the darkest building. No matter what floor you're on, you feel like you're in the basement.

Yes, so it fulfills its purpose if it is supposed to illustrate the byzantine labyrinth workings of municipal government.

Architects love the building? Great, send in the BAC, and let them rent out all the extra space.

The irony of Ted Landsmark ending up owning City Hall is hysterical, seeing as he is an iconic figure in its past.