Let's embrace our inner brutality

Despite all this, I don't think we will ever embrace our inner brutality. The style's vast and ponderous monumentalism is just too much at odds with New England's character and identity.
 
Funny you should say that. This page makes in interesting argument comparing the history of Boston's government to the architecture that housed it.
http://www.wfu.edu/sociology/sociallifeofcities/public/boston/townhall.html

This page illustrates some of the ways social structures and political systems are expressed in architecture. In the eighteenth century when New England was a farmer, merchant, and artisan democracy, it used Faneuil Hall (top) for town meetings. This plain red-brick Georgian building was where male citizens engaged in face-to-face political debate and action. By the late-nineteenth century, in the aftermath of industrial revolution and Civil War, New England was divided into distinct social classes. And Boston's governing assembly moved into this French style, Second Empire, City Hall (middle). This is an architecture of cohesive upper-class rule by wealthy Boston Brahmins. They embraced an ethos of European-styled cultural superiority of the sort captured by novelists Edith Wharton and Henry James. The life span of this fusion between class rule and cultural hierarchy was between 1870 and 1920. Finally, Government Center (bottom), the modernist cement building, is the architecture of a post-industrial society run by managerial elites. This reflects a period (1950s to the present) of admnistration by white-collar, computer-literate bureaucrats without an aptitude for direct democracy or a taste for aesthetics.
 
An apt description of the Commonwealth's entrenched bureaucracies.
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Like the one that allows public servants to have stable jobs that allowed their kids to go to some fancy school so they can come to love Brutalism and go on the internet and complain about the entrenched bureaucracies?

What is wrong with this state?
 
Scott said:
On Gallivan Blvd in Neponset? It has been torn down and replaced. Big design blunder- too many windows, people don't want the whole world seeing them do their banking.
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Hmm, that can't be it. It's pretty much right accross morrisey blvd from JFK/Umass station. I think it's made of stone, but it looks truly brutalist.
 
I realized after I posted it that it was the wrong one. There used to be two very modern concrete banks, one in Neponset Circle on Gallivan and the other on Morrisey at Freeport. Both are gone recently but were really interesting examples of what the average person saw of the genre.
 
Scott said:
Like the one that allows public servants to have stable jobs that allowed their kids to go to some fancy school so they can come to love Brutalism and go on the internet and complain about the entrenched bureaucracies?

What is wrong with this state?
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Touch?, Scott.

If it means anything, my love and knowledge of the built environment have little to do with the college education my dad worked so hard to finance. I have the BPL to thank for that. College did, however, furnish me with some better tools to argue about it.
 
You can also add BU's George Sherman Union and Mugar Memorial Library into this category along with the more famous BU Law Tower. In fact, brutalism is the most prevelant style on BU's Central Campus after the Neo-Gothic facade of CAS.
 
Ron Newman said:
Can a red brick building be considered Brutalist? (And where is that one, anyway?)

Your added pictures have actually disproven some of my first reaction. The Christian Science plaza is beautiful.
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I *love* The Christian Science plaza
 
goody said:
I *love* The Christian Science plaza
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It's a great place to eat lunch on sunny days. I do wish you didn't have to stare at warning signs in the reflecting pool, though...
 
Ron Newman said:
What do the signs say? Beware of doctors?
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This may be the single funniest thing ever posted here.

I recall that the signs warn visitors to the plaza against swimming or wading in the reflecting pool.
 
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I suppose they really are a reflection of our American inclination towards frivolrous lawsuits....I think they have warning signs around the fountain as well
 
Pardon my ignorance, but what's the difference between Christian Science, and Scientology? Are they one in the same, are they different sects of the same religion? This is something I've always wondered but never asked for some reason. In anycase, the Christian Science Plaza is one of my favorite areas in the city.
 
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^ Watch out Ron -- Tom Cruise and his platoon of lawyers are on their way to Davis Square in a black helicopter.
 
Ron Newman said:
Scientology is a made-up religion created by hack sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard, and has no redeeming value whatsoever.
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Well, they did give us the Tom Cruise saga and a couple of extremely hilarious South Park episodes, so there's that
 
Lrfox, you've also probably seen some old, turn-of-the-century churches with the something like "First Chuch of Christ, Scientist" written on them. Those belong to the Christian Science church, which has been around since the late 19th century. Scientology came about in the 1950s.

I too didn't understand those religions were seperate entities for a number of years, and I'd see the old churches and think, "how the hell could those nutty scientologists have that many beautiful old buildings?"
 
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