Tag Archives: Boston City Hall

Heroic?

Mayor John Hynes was elected in 1949, John Collins in 1960. Collins brought in Ed Logue as the director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, established in 1957.

These men faced a problem. Boston was in trouble. After a depression, two wars, long-time corruption and a changing industrial base, the city was losing manufacturing, jobs and population. The mayors and Logue intended to re-invent Boston.

This is the story with which the authors of Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston (The Monacelli Press) begin their tale of how, beginning in the 1960s, concrete took over architecture in America’s most tradition-bound city.

The book is arranged in essays by various architects and critics with accompanying photos far too small. Photographs of Boston’s Brutalist buildings in the middle portion of the book are better. Reading the book, you’ll realize concrete buildings are everywhere, many of which were in the background before. (The Colonnade Hotel?)

The authors suggest that, partly because of the mayors’ and Logue’s efforts, heroic could replace the term Brutalism, taken from the French béton brut, meaning raw concrete.

It certainly took guts to defy tradition and take big steps. It was government investing in infrastructure that would jump-start a resurgence. That’s the heroic part.

But the re-invention was mixed. Hynes and the BRA demolished the old West End and built the regrettable Central Artery. But Hynes persuaded the Prudential Insurance Company to build Boston’s first skyscraper over old railroad yards. Its construction from 1960 to 1964 was a hopeful sign.

The real effort, however, was creating Government Center. This is where concrete triumphed with its centerpiece, Boston City Hall.

The authors point out such virtues of Boston City Hall as the city councilors’ offices overlooking the public space of City Hall Plaza. They describe its monumentality and the patterns of light and shadow created by its detail. The authors go into rapture over Paul Rudolph’s Government Services Building. And love for the Christian Science Center spills over like the water does in its long rectangular pool.

They delve into the origins of béton brut, practiced by Le Corbusier and other Europeans before the style came to America. Béton brut was a departure from the thin International Style. They contend it follows a classical tradition.

A problem with this book—maybe it is my problem reading about art and architecture—is what do some sentences mean? “Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-production society and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work.” Really?

“Brutalism has been discussed stylistically, whereas its essence is ethical.” Ethical?

Or “Heroic architecture . . . [was] meant to reveal the realities of its time and forge a new honesty . . .” Does concrete reveal realities anymore than, let’s say, steel?

And “the New Brutalism was an idealism about realism.” Hmmm.

The book brings up many questions. Brutalism is admired by architects and critics. Regular people, not so much. Today a writer describing Back Bay Station, pointed out the “forbidding” concrete wall. Fortress-like is another term commoners use to describe these buildings. Why is there a schism between professionals and lay people? Would lay people like Brutalism more if we were better educated? Or are architects shunned if they don’t follow the line?

How much should we take into account people’s physical reaction to concrete? It gets dirty. It’s cold. We’d rather stand next to tiger maple.

The Christian Science Center is another example of attracting people or not. We learn that the Christian Scientists, behaving like Christians, built concrete Church Park across the street before they demolished the 19th-century row houses along Massachusetts Avenue and opened up the handsome view to the church buildings. This meant displaced residents had homes.

This complex is admired for its geometry and its long reflecting pool. But even in summer, compared to a teeming Boston sidewalk, few people gather along the pool’s edges or walk through the site. Do people have to want to be there for good architecture to take place?

How important is a sense of place to a building’s success? The Brutalist New England Aquarium could be in Framingham for all the nods it gives to its harbor side location. The Hurley Building ignores its neighbors on Cambridge Street. Early Brutalist Le Corbusier designed a building at Harvard that looks as if it belongs in a suburb with two-acre zoning rather than along the low-key urban Quincy Street.

How well does a building have to work be an asset? City Hall’s layout was organized—services on the bottom, offices at the top—but people find it hard to navigate. Worse are the acoustics. The authors gave a talk at City Hall in the foyer, envisioned by its architects as a place for performances and presentations. We could hear only half their talk. In the city council’s hearing room, you can’t hear either.

Finally, would Boston, with its hospitals and universities, have come back from the brink without the heroics of its leaders and architecture? We’ll never know.

One thing is for sure. These buildings are here to stay. Bill Le Messurier, the late, renowned structural engineer, said the only way to demolish Boston City Hall would be “with a controlled nuclear device.”

But the heroic buildings are in dire need. Many of them are government buildings, and we know how hard it is to get money to spend on the public sector these days. We need to clean, repair, enhance, even re-configure these behemoths to make them better fit into the city and make us feel better about living with them.

How soon do you think that’s going to happen?

When should a building be landmarked?

Mayor Walsh wants to illuminate Boston City Hall, which opened in 1969. William Rawn’s redesign of architect Philip Johnson’s 1971 addition to the Boston Public Library is coming to fruition.

These two events bring home the complications of deciding what architecture to preserve in a history-obsessed city.

These buildings have commonalities. They are public, built with taxpayers’ money at about the same time. They both employ the Brutalism style, although the Johnson building uses granite, not concrete. Architects and architectural historians appreciate them. The public mostly detests them.

The Johnson building was landmarked by the Boston Landmarks Commission in 2000. Landmarks oversees Boston’s historic districts, imposes demolition delays on historic structures, and designates buildings as landmarks, according to chair Lynn Smiledge. In the Johnson building’s case, this means the commission must approve changes to its exterior, entry hall and the voluminous staircase atrium.

City Hall is not landmarked. When the mayor wanted to illuminate it, however, he had to obtain Landmarks’ approval because the building’s landmark status is “pending.” In 2007, several residents, including Douglass Shand-Tucci, Sue Prindle, and Friends of the Public Garden founder Henry Lee, submitted a petition to landmark City Hall. The next step would be for Landmarks to commission a study describing the building’s architectural and historic importance to the city and to the state, region or nation. That study was not undertaken.

“There has been a drum beat against mid-century modernism,” said architectural historian Keith Morgan, a professor at Boston University. Morgan believes City Hall’s poor condition is a reason the public doesn’t warm to it. He was one of several individuals who urged Landmarks to move forward with the City Hall study.

“City Hall is clearly of landmark quality,” he said. “It’s the exceptional nature of its design and its historic significance. It was the building that reversed Boston’s downward spiral. We owe it a debt of gratitude.”

Such exhortations have fallen on deaf ears. Lauren Zingarelli, Director of Communications and Community Engagement in the Mayor’s Office of Environment, Energy, and Open Space explained it this way:

“Each year the BLC Work Plan prioritizes two or three study reports for pending landmarks,” she said. “These priorities are based on available funding, owner support and perceived threat.”

With little “owner” support—i.e. two mayors—and threats to the building proposed only by them, Landmarks probably saw few benefits from moving forward on City Hall.

The Johnson building’s story is different. Both library buildings were designated at the same time. They were not threatened. No one would probably object to landmarking the 1895 McKim building that faces Copley Square.

But the Johnson building’s architectural significance is unclear. The report said, “The Johnson addition looks reverently to the McKim building for several of its architectural guiding principles and yet utterly disregards it many ways . . . The starkness of the Johnson addition continues the refined grandeur of the McKim without competing with its visual richness. The disdain for the human scale evident in the Johnson design, however, undercuts the effectiveness of utilizing classical principles in its arrangement and renders its academic ideal lifeless.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of architectural significance.

The Johnson building’s historic significance is also dubious.

The report said it shows how “library philosophy” has changed. For example, open stacks were the norm in the mid-20th century as they had not been in the 1800s. Perhaps that can be construed as history.

The report dwells on Philip Johnson’s importance as a scholar, a taste-maker, and a person whose “sympathy with the Beaux-Arts . . . [gives] his work an altogether more serious character.”

The Kardashians are taste-makers too. It’s hard to see Johnson’s sympathy with the Beaux-Arts in any of his buildings except maybe in symmetry.

Keith Morgan pushed back on me. Johnson and others like him had a profound influence on other architects, he said. That is important.

These buildings’ stories leave one feeling that landmarking, like much of human endeavor, is fraught with subjective feelings despite the principles in place.

Questions still need to be answered.

  • Should a certain amount of time pass before a building is considered for landmarking—say 50 years? The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s original “palace” and its 2012 Renzo Piano addition were landmarked in 2011, before the addition was finished. The addition is fine, but is this another case of a celebrity architect trumping a measured judgment of how a building works with the city over time?
  • To what extent should the public’s affection for a building affect landmarking? Victorian buildings we now appreciate were dismissed by some 20th century critics as vulgar. A future example could be the Hurley Building and its mental health facility, the Lindemann Center, on Cambridge Street. Keith Morgan praises its sculptural quality, but its unpleasant relationship to the street, even without the temporary, dirty steel fences around it, makes pedestrians want to walk on the other side. Its maker was celebrity architect Paul Rudolph.
  • To what extent should materials be considered? We’ve learned that concrete ages poorly, and it’s not only because the public concrete buildings have been left to rot.
  • Can we consider how a building contributes to a sense of place, a sense of Boston? The old Shreve, Crump and Low building at the corner of Boylston and Arlington did not receive landmark status and sits empty, destined for demolition. Its removal will affect the sense of early 20th century Boston within a whole block.

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I hope more regular citizens get involved in these matters so we can hash them out.

Giving thanks

You will probably be sitting around a table soon telling friends and family what you are thankful for.

We think about the big things—those friends and family members, the good food, good health, a satisfying job. We can easily forget other enjoyments, amenities and endeavors that enrich our lives.

I’m here to remind you of such enrichments.

For example, give thanks for the new 311. Punch that into your phone, and City Hall answers. You can report a missed trash bag, a street light that is out or a dangerous pothole. 311 is not 911, which is for emergencies. 311, though, keeps all those little city pieces functioning.

Now that I’ve mentioned it, let’s thank the trash pickup. It works. The trucks are clean considering what they handle. They come when they say they will. The guys are pretty neat in the pickup. What they leave behind is mostly the fault of lazy residents who deposit their trash the night before, leaving 12 dark hours for the rats to chew through the bags and strew the contents all over the sidewalk.

This is the time of year to be thankful for winterberry, that native New England holly flashing its bunched, small, neon-red fruits in the region’s marshes right now. Birds gobble up the drupes by mid-December when these shrubs become indistinguishable from the other bare branches you can see. Wade into the wetlands and harvest the berries, or buy them at florist shops. But be wary of poking them into your window box. The birds will swoop in for a feast, and you will be left with bare sticks.

I’m thankful for New England churches, not necessarily for their religion but for their architecture. Every small town has one marking its center, many built before the separation of church and state. Along with Cape Cod, Federal and Greek Revival-style houses, they create a sense of place that few other American regions can match. They embody Louis Sullivan’s directive that “form follows function.”

It is too bad Walter Gropius hadn’t seen them when he began his career in Germany, since their simple shapes, balanced features, clear volumes and modest ornamentation anticipated his theories by more than a century. Some Bauhaus or International Style buildings are fine, but those old Congregational churches comprise some of the world’s best simple architecture.

We also should thank the Registry of Motor Vehicles this year for not sweating the small stuff. It finally allowed Lindsay Miller to wear a spaghetti strainer on her head for her driver’s license photo. According to a report in the Boston Globe, Miller calls herself a “Pastafarian”—a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who, its followers say, might have created the world. While we’re at it, let’s be thankful for yet another religion based on magic and improbabilities. Whatever spins your dial, as one might say.

We should also be thankful for Police Commissioner William Evans. He won’t remember me, but I met him at Back Bay neighborhood meetings when he was District 4’s captain. He was straightforward, unruffled, sensible and articulate about policing matters. When he talks, as he did recently telling Bostonians the police were beefing up security at certain venues in response to the Paris mayhem, he commands respect and admiration. Lucky Bostonians.

We should be thankful for our parks, especially the newest one. The Greenway has come into its own, with trees, shrubs and perennials maturing nicely, a staff that calms neighbors rather than inflaming them, and lovable activities, attractions and art we.

I was skeptical about the airborne Echelman sculpture, since her similar works had appeared many times elsewhere. I was afraid it would be like those dreadful cows that surfaced in every city.

I was wrong. The aerial sculpture was fabulous. We should thank the owners of the buildings at 125 High Street, International Place and the Intercontinental Hotel, from which it hung, for being good sports.

Finally, we should give thanks for musicians. The night after President Kennedy was murdered, Leonard Bernstein assembled the New York Philharmonic for a television performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. The music didn’t change the tragedy, but it reminded listeners that civilization’s beauty is bigger than some creepy guy with a gun.

After the massacres on November 13, a pianist set up his grand piano on a Paris street and played Imagine, confirming that the Beatles have made it into the classical musical canon.

It didn’t change things either, but the performance reminded listeners that there is a better world out there than eight pathetic murderers.

Keep City Hall Plaza

Mayor Walsh has asked for help in re-making City Hall Plaza. He has resorted to Twitter to re-invent, re-imagine, re-envision #CityHallPlaza.

In letters, radio commentary and Twitter, Bostonians have chimed in. Art exhibits, a baseball diamond, a roller rink, Yo-Yo Ma’s music garden idea, trees, an inexplicable suggestion for an “enhanced multimodal hub-ness”—all these ideas are great.

Except none of them will work.

I’d like you to consider a shocking concept: there is nothing wrong with City Hall Plaza itself. It’s the edges that make it fail.

(Full disclosure: I once served on a mayor-appointed panel that heard opinions on what to do about the plaza.)

Let’s concentrate on the plaza’s pluses. Find the bird’s eye view of the plaza soon after it was completed on #CityHallPlaza on Twitter. It’s not bad. The brick looks warm. Granite steps break up the expanse. The fountain is tucked in rather nicely.

The plaza functions well for one purpose—big crowds, whether it’s for a concert or a sports celebration. (Trees, a common suggestion, will get trampled by boisterous fans celebrating the next Red Sox World Series Championship, should that ever occur.)

City Hall Plaza’s architects are said to have envisioned Italy’s great plazas when they laid out theirs. Regrettably, most 1960s architects concentrated on whatever they were designing and forgot the setting their design was in. Copying the great Italian plazas, they noted the empty space, the majestic building at one end, the limestone surface, the activity. They ignored the feature that made those plazas successful—the edges.

Whether in Venice, Sienna or Rome, otherwise cold, windswept plazas are lined with dozens of cafes and restaurants filled with people. Those restaurants open early and close late. If you’ve visited Italy, I’ll bet you’ve crossed those plazas to find a spot to sit, sip a coffee or glass of wine, and watch the activity.

So here’s my recommendation: keep the design of the plaza. Remove that awful concrete and restore the old fountain. Re-lay the bricks. Pull out the weeds that make the granite steps buckle. Care for the trees next to the JFK building and plant the pits with flowers that someone waters. This fix is cheap.

Then rezone the edges. An eyeglass shop or an office supply store has no business being on the Sears Crescent side of the plaza. Neither does a blank back entrance to the New England Center for Homeless Veterans. Instead ask the vets to enliven their entrance, perhaps with a café that they run. Persuade Boston’s best restaurateurs to set up shop and spill out onto the plaza. Let them stay open late. But that’s only one edge.

Cambridge Street presents a challenge. A roadway is a disaster for Italian-style plazas. The farmer’s market helped, and food carts or Faneuil Hall-style trinket carts could too, and once many years ago, they occupied space there and were successful.

The last blank edge degrading the plaza is the JFK building. When a hotel was proposed in the 1990s, some objected to privatizing public space. But that use would have succeeded in bringing life to that edge. The feds objected to the hotel, claiming that windows facing the JFK would make it vulnerable to bomb-throwing terrorists. We didn’t yet know airplanes were a bigger threat.

If the feds are scared of having people nearby, they shouldn’t be located next to an active plaza. It is a long shot to persuade JFK’s handlers to invite activity into its ground floor, but it is worth trying. The state successfully did this at the Saltonstall Building across the street.

Meanwhile, activate the plaza with events and all sorts of things. Because of no good edges, it will take an dedicated leader and a lot of programming.

Bostonians should take comfort. We don’t have the worst city hall plaza. Visit Dallas, or go online to view their city hall and its surroundings, brought to them by I. M. Pei, the over-rated architect who laid out our regrettable Government Center.

Dallas City Hall is uglier than ours—hard as that might be to imagine. Roadways surround that plaza, and its surface is concrete.

As to Boston City Hall itself? Plant some ivy. Let it grow up the walls. And call it a day.

 

City Hall Plaza redux

We’re giving it another go. Can we agree on the newest plan to improve City Hall Plaza? Will it be implemented? Will it succeed in improving the place everyone dislikes but no one can change?

The nail on which this picture hangs is sustainability. We’ve got to go green on the plaza, say this effort’s movers and shakers. Perhaps the sustainability trend has enough heft to rally us around a plan that someone can come up with the money to build.

I use the word “plan,” but the designers of the latest version of improvement wouldn’t. “Plan” is too definite, causing someone to complain they weren’t consulted before the “plan” was in place. So the implementers use the term “proto-scheme.” Perhaps that is somewhat like “the earth was without form, and void . . .” Continue reading →