The Hub on Causeway (née TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

I totally agree with tobyjug's assessment. City Hall, the Plaza, and Government Center (GC) in general came out of a time when there was a bold vision of the future, a radical and heroic departure from the past. Some would say it was taken a bit too far in the case of GC, but it was the spirit of the time.
 
Beton Brut said:
Fair enough, but I think you'll agree that Avenir, The Victor, and The Beverly are three of the shittiest looking buildings of this cycle, and One Canal is at best, forgettable. Charles Bulfinch would put this crap to the torch.
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I've always argued the value of background buildings. Except for One Canal I have no issue with these as they fill in the urban fabric fine. One Canal was the place for a landmark building and it's true that today we don't see many bold developers. But the problem is, unlike in the 1960s, we don't have to be bold anymore. The city, architects, and developers had to be bold because they were trying to save cities. Today the trend has done a 180 as more and more people, young and old, are rediscovering urban living. No one has to be bold when they are the center of attention. In 1960 Boston didn't work but today it works too well that we are struggling to keep up. Unfortunately no one has anything to prove anymore. But I take the long view, cities have always had shitty development. It's the buildings of worth which last. The problem is when we look back all we see is what's survived and we don't see all the crap we tore down (and to be fair not all of that was crap).
 
I think they serve their purpose fine. You mostly only see the back of the merano which looks fine and then the glass fronts of the merano and victor. Besides that you see ground level of both. Theyre not incredible but they fill out the area well. The hub on causeway is what draws your eye here and these just fill their role. As long as they are not oh my god stand out like a sore thumb ugly, they fill their role just fine. Anonymous background buildings are very underrated. Look at Dubai or London where the skyline screams at you looook at meere nooo f him look at meee over here naaa guys check me out though. It hurts. You actually need them to have a great city. Our skyline looks amazing and better every year because we had such a background building filled skyline that now our great new architecture has room to be great. MT looks amazing because its the center of attention. If we had 6 of em it wouldnt be as dramatic. Our skyline is starting to have great buildings that are spaced out perfectly. You dont want ass ugly like 888 boylston, but the copley westin is juuuuust right.

How great does the office podium look though? I mean damn Im surprised a squat box looks that good. This new street wall on causeway looks interesting and dynamic.
 
FitchburgLine said:
[the CR-Subway connection] is fenced off inside and the exterior podium work seems to be finishing up, I’ll ask a worker if the schedule has changed.
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Thanks! It will cut 4 minutes each way for thousands (ten thousand?) Of people per day.
 
Charlie_mta said:
I totally agree with tobyjug's assessment. City Hall, the Plaza, and Government Center (GC) in general came out of a time when there was a bold vision of the future, a radical and heroic departure from the past. Some would say it was taken a bit too far in the case of GC, but it was the spirit of the time.
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That vision was fuck poor people lets get rid of their neighborhoods and build highways and barren concrete plazas everywhere. Bold visions aren't necessarily good ones.
 
coleslaw said:
That vision was fuck poor people lets get rid of their neighborhoods and build highways and barren concrete plazas everywhere. Bold visions aren't necessarily good ones.
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This. The architecture of the "people who sent men to the moon" is unhuman garbage and nothing would bring me more joy than leveling it and wiping its memory from the city landscape. It is a complete failure as anything functional and basically just some sort of insane oppressive city-scale experiment gone wrong. Even its proponents seem to recognize that it's bad at its intended purpose because they can't wit a straight face do more than use marketing buzzwords like "bold, visionary, prophetic, etc." in its defense.

Menino's great failure was not finding a way to destroy city hall and the plaza before anyone said a peep about protecting it.
 
I'll split the difference and say I actually like these buildings, and brutalism in general, but yeah, the people who built this stuff and reconfigured this area were the mid-century white elite, and it showed. It cost $15 billion to partially undo their segregation-via-infrastructure.
 
coleslaw said:
Bold visions aren't necessarily good ones.
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And you could say something similar about neo-collectivist political philosophy...

I'll listen to a well-reasoned argument from any political position, in particular those that I disagree with -- it's how my thinking grows and evolves. In one of your posts, you make reference to David Harvey, the British anthropologist and proponent of the Right to the City movement. Are there contemporary thinkers on this topic? Could you quote or recontextualize their ideas, frame them in the wider discussions of displacement that many families are experiencing in urban neighborhoods across Greater Boston? Does your tune have any more notes?
 
Beton Brut said:
And you could say something similar about neo-collectivist political philosophy...

I'll listen to a well-reasoned argument from any political position, in particular those that I disagree with -- it's how my thinking grows and evolves. In one of your posts, you make reference to David Harvey, the British anthropologist and proponent of the Right to the City movement. Are there contemporary thinkers on this topic? Could you quote or recontextualize their ideas, frame them in the wider discussions of displacement that many families are experiencing in urban neighborhoods across Greater Boston? Does your tune have any more notes?
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Well first no one calls themselves a neo-collectivist, no one for that matter calls themselves a collectivist or has for about a century. That term is an effort to collapse differing and often conflicting tendencies under a single and often tonally sneering label.

Harvey is probably my favorite thinker on these issues. His analysis of gentrification and displacement in multifaceted but, at least in my reading of him, it rests centrally on the analysis of the contradiction between use and exchange value under capitalism. Housing of course has use values, shelter, privacy, etc. which drove the production of it for millennia. But more recently, as a commodity it has another value, exchange value, that has little relationship to its use and instead determined by speculation.

He connects this to NIMBYism (in the original racist sense not in the sense that many of you use it to mean anyone critical of any aspect of development) in that people of color living there is seen as a threat to exchange value. He also points out that particularly in instances of crisis or recession, an intrinsic part of capitalism that most capitalists pretend just doesnt exist, that exchange value can destroy use value (this can happen in several ways: rich people sitting on homes to sell later and drive up prices, homes underwater, eviction, etc.). He also importantly points out that booms and busts (spatially and temporally) rely on each-other as capital restructures itself across time and geography. As one location is looted of resources and left to crumble those resources are flooded into new centers (or sites of former collapse). In this sense gentrification and displacement in say Boston is deeply entwined with the neoliberal gutting of services in places like flint (freeing up that capital to come to places like this).

there are other radicals in urban studies related fields such as Colin Ward, notable for his support of DIY housing and popular+ autonomous approaches to planning, Franco La Cecla, notable for his critique of architecture as it is currently practiced in "statement buildings" with no sense of broader public good, and a wide variety of situationist influenced thinkers in urban studies. There are also a lot of different proposals for more cooperative and popular approaches to architecture and planning both by thinkers and on the ground movements, such as tenant unions.
 
^ Fascinating -- thank you. I have a bit of reading to do.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on Hernando de Soto Polar's ideas on property rights, and the "open-source" architecture of Shigeru Ban, often created in service of those left homeless after a natural disaster.

(probably best that we continue this discussion elsewhere)
 
SlothofDespond said:
The architecture of the "people who sent men to the moon" is unhuman garbage and nothing would bring me more joy than leveling it and wiping its memory from the city landscape. It is a complete failure as anything functional and basically just some sort of insane oppressive city-scale experiment gone wrong. Even its proponents seem to recognize that it's bad at its intended purpose because they can't wit a straight face do more than use marketing buzzwords like "bold, visionary, prophetic, etc." in its defense.
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I agree. However, at the time in the 1950's/60's the city was on the ropes and the suburbs were on the rise. Charles River Park and GC were built to bring the suburbs to the city and bring people back in. The old elevated Central Artery was built as well to stave off a potential downward spiral.

Were entire neighborhoods destroyed, were large populations of low income people shafted? Yes.

In an ideal world, Scollay Square and the West End would have been redeveloped in the early 1960's in a much more precise, targeted manner, preserving the salvageable buildings and building facades where possible, and preserving the street pattern. The Central Artery would have been built as a surface boulevard with a 4-track N-S link beneath, instead of the hideous elevated Central Artery. Hindsight is 20-20, but the city leaders at the time saw a city needing drastic life support. Also, federal urban renewal funding encouraged wholesale wiping out of areas rather than lot-by-lot rehabilitation and redevelopment.
 
I don't see how a street level config would have worked at all - having i93 at street level cutting the city in half seems worse than the El.
 
You're right. A surface-only Central Artery (with no elevated or tunnel) would have required an Inner Belt Expressway to the west thru Cambridge to serve as the main north-south expressway. Or, another option would have been a larger Ted Williams tunnel with an expressway tie-in across Chelsea and south Everett to tie into I-93 southeast of Medford Square.

Okay, now we're way off topic.
 
Office Tower 510 to the tip. Per Presentation at the BPDA Board Meeting.
 
Charlie_mta said:
I agree. However, at the time in the 1950's/60's the city was on the ropes and the suburbs were on the rise. Charles River Park and GC were built to bring the suburbs to the city and bring people back in. The old elevated Central Artery was built as well to stave off a potential downward spiral.

Were entire neighborhoods destroyed, were large populations of low income people shafted? Yes.

In an ideal world, Scollay Square and the West End would have been redeveloped in the early 1960's in a much more precise, targeted manner, preserving the salvageable buildings and building facades where possible, and preserving the street pattern. The Central Artery would have been built as a surface boulevard with a 4-track N-S link beneath, instead of the hideous elevated Central Artery. Hindsight is 20-20, but the city leaders at the time saw a city needing drastic life support. Also, federal urban renewal funding encouraged wholesale wiping out of areas rather than lot-by-lot rehabilitation and redevelopment.
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It all came full circle because now we have a park ring running the length of downtown that we otherwise would not have. The west end sux, but we have amazing brick neighborhoods everywhere, we dont have greenways everywhere so it worked out in the end.
 
For anybody who cares, the bottom of Page 2 on this link shows the Office Tower portion will rise to 510'. At least it ever so slightly increases the differentiation in heights among the 4 towers that will be in this area, and as a stats guy I'm always pleased to get another 500 footer in Boston.

http://boston.siretechnologies.com/...4ezzjrnnutnij01cv/24944806172018091745327.PDF

Obviously the negative is that the design is probably not going to be the greatest. I'm holding out hope that it won't be as bad in real life, and that the Congress Street Office Tower will eventually be the gem in this area of the skyline.
 
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