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building babel
Guest
Re: finally
I love it too. Big bold and beautiful. And it even has sticky-out bits like 77 Elm.
I love it too. Big bold and beautiful. And it even has sticky-out bits like 77 Elm.
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ganjavih
Guest
Re: finally
What's worse than the building itself is the empty, depressing windswept "plaza" that surrounds it. That district is so out of place in Boston which is mostly dense, urban and walkable. The Government Center area is like a little chunk of suburbia plopped into a great urban place. And then there's the side that fronts Congress St. which says a big f&%* you to pedestrians. It's really a horrible blunder... much worse in person.
What's worse than the building itself is the empty, depressing windswept "plaza" that surrounds it. That district is so out of place in Boston which is mostly dense, urban and walkable. The Government Center area is like a little chunk of suburbia plopped into a great urban place. And then there's the side that fronts Congress St. which says a big f&%* you to pedestrians. It's really a horrible blunder... much worse in person.
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allabootmatt
Guest
Re: finally
If nothing else, the ugly brutality of the building is an apt metaphor for the general tone of Boston civic bureaucracy, or so my Bostonian friends tell me.
If nothing else, the ugly brutality of the building is an apt metaphor for the general tone of Boston civic bureaucracy, or so my Bostonian friends tell me.
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Bogtrotter
Guest
B
building babel
Guest
Re: finally
The irregular plaza reminds me of Siena's Piazza del Campo. What a wonderful redevelopment opportunity.
The irregular plaza reminds me of Siena's Piazza del Campo. What a wonderful redevelopment opportunity.
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adma
Guest
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AlvinofDiaspar
Guest
Re: finally
Equating Boston City Hall and what it did to the local urban fabric to buildings like Riverdale Hospital is like comparing the Chrysler Building in New York with NY Towers in North York.
AoD
Equating Boston City Hall and what it did to the local urban fabric to buildings like Riverdale Hospital is like comparing the Chrysler Building in New York with NY Towers in North York.
AoD
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scarberiankhatru
Guest
"Yeah, sure, and John Andrews' Scarborough College is a concrete monstrosity that'd be better off ripped down on behalf of something "humane"."
Why stop there? Let's ride this slippery slope to the bottom and tear down every building with exterior concrete. The difference is that lots of brutalist buildings are quite functional, while BCH seems to be completely dysfunctional. I've never been there, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to be good for nothing other than eliciting aggressively defensive rhetoric from the archi-snob community...and I'd wager one of the main reasons BCH is revered by them is that it is seen as so ugly by normal people (to me, in pictures, it comes across as really awkward but not necessarily ugly). Scarborough College, to me, is just a building made with a lot of concrete; BCH really earns its "brutal" equation of concrete + monstrosity.
Perhaps it's comments, not from academic snobs or from local yokels, but from people that actually have to use the building, that should carry the most weight:
Should it matter how "honest" or "brilliant" it is if workers are literally suffering on the inside? If the interior issues are unresolvable, then maybe it should get torn down with little ceremony. The plaza can be changed and the "ugliness" will fade with time and changing trends, but even if there was no "tear it down" movement, the civic workers may revolt and be shipped off to some other office building, anyway, leaving BCH empty and pretty much useless. So, again, if you're gonna pick one lamb to sacrifice to the gods of anti-Modernism, you might as well pick the one with lupus and anthrax.
Why stop there? Let's ride this slippery slope to the bottom and tear down every building with exterior concrete. The difference is that lots of brutalist buildings are quite functional, while BCH seems to be completely dysfunctional. I've never been there, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to be good for nothing other than eliciting aggressively defensive rhetoric from the archi-snob community...and I'd wager one of the main reasons BCH is revered by them is that it is seen as so ugly by normal people (to me, in pictures, it comes across as really awkward but not necessarily ugly). Scarborough College, to me, is just a building made with a lot of concrete; BCH really earns its "brutal" equation of concrete + monstrosity.
Perhaps it's comments, not from academic snobs or from local yokels, but from people that actually have to use the building, that should carry the most weight:
Should it matter how "honest" or "brilliant" it is if workers are literally suffering on the inside? If the interior issues are unresolvable, then maybe it should get torn down with little ceremony. The plaza can be changed and the "ugliness" will fade with time and changing trends, but even if there was no "tear it down" movement, the civic workers may revolt and be shipped off to some other office building, anyway, leaving BCH empty and pretty much useless. So, again, if you're gonna pick one lamb to sacrifice to the gods of anti-Modernism, you might as well pick the one with lupus and anthrax.
4
4Pook
Guest
>From: John Geiger
>Edmonton City Hall, hailed as having brought "International Style to the Alberta capital," opened in 1957, was gone a mere 40 years later without a single preservationist placard in sight.
Sad, but not quite true. During the competition for a new City Hall in Edmonton the runner-up scheme by George Baird's team incorporated the old building, even though it was supposed to be knocked down. The result would have been splendid, but Gene Dub won.
To the jururs Gene seemed to have a better handle on the program organization, which shouldn't be surprising, as he organized the competition. Unfortunately the program forgot about poetry and Edmonton got another dud building.
The Baird entry immediately came to mind when I read of the presumed fate of the Boston City Hall. It is fairly brutal in its context, but if you stripped it back to the base structure of concrete and played around a bit, you might make something cool, get rid of the mice, bring the building up to date. There is a lot of space on that site.
It would make a statement of the Boston government's commitment to being green if the building was recycled. New parts could be built first, so no one would have to move far. No matter how iconic, this building has too many sins to preserve anything like as is.
I hope Boston remembers to put in parks while they are redeveloping their waterfront.
>Edmonton City Hall, hailed as having brought "International Style to the Alberta capital," opened in 1957, was gone a mere 40 years later without a single preservationist placard in sight.
Sad, but not quite true. During the competition for a new City Hall in Edmonton the runner-up scheme by George Baird's team incorporated the old building, even though it was supposed to be knocked down. The result would have been splendid, but Gene Dub won.
To the jururs Gene seemed to have a better handle on the program organization, which shouldn't be surprising, as he organized the competition. Unfortunately the program forgot about poetry and Edmonton got another dud building.
The Baird entry immediately came to mind when I read of the presumed fate of the Boston City Hall. It is fairly brutal in its context, but if you stripped it back to the base structure of concrete and played around a bit, you might make something cool, get rid of the mice, bring the building up to date. There is a lot of space on that site.
It would make a statement of the Boston government's commitment to being green if the building was recycled. New parts could be built first, so no one would have to move far. No matter how iconic, this building has too many sins to preserve anything like as is.
I hope Boston remembers to put in parks while they are redeveloping their waterfront.
A
adma
Guest
Well, if anything, this may be the architectural-preservationist equivalent of Tilted Arc.
Except that Toronto already has an analogous example, right down it its "Ministry Of Truth" quality--Robarts Library.
Not just a Big Freaking Ugly Anti-urban Concrete Brutalist Monstrosity, but the kind that just about leaves those who toil within literally *sick*. That migrainey, hacking-coughey, particles-floating feeling. It's *resented*--and it's all compounded by its associations with scholarly drudgework, just as BCH's sins are compounded by associations with municipal bureaucracy malfeasance bla bla bla. ("No wonder its namesake shot himself", it used to be said of Robarts.) Sure, it's been "humanized" to a degree in recent times, the ground floor entrance carved out etc; but fundamentally, nothing's changed. What *can* one change? Better to blow the whole thing up.
And yet. And yet. Trouble is, people in high and powerful places started "liking" it. Maybe the tipping point came when it made it on the Inventory of Heritage Properties in the 90s. Now, it looks like Robarts is there for keeps; and only a rearguard fool or some urban-counterreformatory wave's gonna blow this sucka up. So once again, Architects 1, Users 0.
And Robarts isn't even as "important" as BCH. Robarts's Yank consulting architects, Warner Burns Toan & Lunde, were specialists in college-campus megastructures by the pound. Hacks, not geniuses, so to speak.
Get the picture?
Now, as goes the future of BCH, if you transpose this to a Toronto context, here's how I can see things transpiring...it would probably be, say, a Karen Stintz/Peter Milczyn contingent rallying for selling it off and building a replacement elsewhere. Needless to say, Kyle Rae would be vocally defending retention; so would Adam Vaughan (the spirit of dad, after all). And the usual phalanx of figureheads and specialists and culturati and Michael McClelland and Cathy Nasmith and Margie Zeidler would get together on behalf of a "Save BCH" campaign, arguing that all it needs is a thorough retrofitting, finetuning, etc. And in the end, they'd sway enough people (including Miller) to defeat the Stintz/Milczyn plan. (Besides, it's more than likely that were Boston like Toronto, a lot of the necessary fine-tunings/retrofits would *already* have taken place, likely with the supervision or approval of the original architects.)
Prove me wrong...
Except that Toronto already has an analogous example, right down it its "Ministry Of Truth" quality--Robarts Library.
Not just a Big Freaking Ugly Anti-urban Concrete Brutalist Monstrosity, but the kind that just about leaves those who toil within literally *sick*. That migrainey, hacking-coughey, particles-floating feeling. It's *resented*--and it's all compounded by its associations with scholarly drudgework, just as BCH's sins are compounded by associations with municipal bureaucracy malfeasance bla bla bla. ("No wonder its namesake shot himself", it used to be said of Robarts.) Sure, it's been "humanized" to a degree in recent times, the ground floor entrance carved out etc; but fundamentally, nothing's changed. What *can* one change? Better to blow the whole thing up.
And yet. And yet. Trouble is, people in high and powerful places started "liking" it. Maybe the tipping point came when it made it on the Inventory of Heritage Properties in the 90s. Now, it looks like Robarts is there for keeps; and only a rearguard fool or some urban-counterreformatory wave's gonna blow this sucka up. So once again, Architects 1, Users 0.
And Robarts isn't even as "important" as BCH. Robarts's Yank consulting architects, Warner Burns Toan & Lunde, were specialists in college-campus megastructures by the pound. Hacks, not geniuses, so to speak.
Get the picture?
Now, as goes the future of BCH, if you transpose this to a Toronto context, here's how I can see things transpiring...it would probably be, say, a Karen Stintz/Peter Milczyn contingent rallying for selling it off and building a replacement elsewhere. Needless to say, Kyle Rae would be vocally defending retention; so would Adam Vaughan (the spirit of dad, after all). And the usual phalanx of figureheads and specialists and culturati and Michael McClelland and Cathy Nasmith and Margie Zeidler would get together on behalf of a "Save BCH" campaign, arguing that all it needs is a thorough retrofitting, finetuning, etc. And in the end, they'd sway enough people (including Miller) to defeat the Stintz/Milczyn plan. (Besides, it's more than likely that were Boston like Toronto, a lot of the necessary fine-tunings/retrofits would *already* have taken place, likely with the supervision or approval of the original architects.)
Prove me wrong...
B
building babel
Guest
Why would Kyle Rae vote to save a fine of-its-time building like that if it were in Toronto? He, and David Miller, voted to allow demolition of the Concourse Building - while Stintz equivalent Jane Pitfield voted to preserve it.
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maxy505
Guest
Many Modernist and Brutalist buildings are worthy to sit in an art museum. Having seen it in person, I know that Boston City Hall does have an emotional impact on me similar to what I feel when I look at "Scream". This must be a large part of the reason why some people fight to preserve popularly-reviled buildings.
However -- architecture is an art that forces itself on everybody in its vicinity. I don't hang "Scream" beside my bed, but many Bostonians have no choice but to endure walking by BCH every day. If the large majority hates it, they should not be obliged to suffer for somebody else's art.
Tear it down! Preserve it in virtual reality, so future students can tour it and admire its importance on a holodeck or whatever.
However -- architecture is an art that forces itself on everybody in its vicinity. I don't hang "Scream" beside my bed, but many Bostonians have no choice but to endure walking by BCH every day. If the large majority hates it, they should not be obliged to suffer for somebody else's art.
Tear it down! Preserve it in virtual reality, so future students can tour it and admire its importance on a holodeck or whatever.
B
Bogtrotter
Guest
Destroy the Scream- there are plenty of copies available 
S
scarberiankhatru
Guest
"That migrainey, hacking-coughey, particles-floating feeling."
The average U of T student is always sick, sniffling, and miserable; being in Robarts just reminds them of how much work they have to do and then they get depressed, too.
The average U of T student is always sick, sniffling, and miserable; being in Robarts just reminds them of how much work they have to do and then they get depressed, too.
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borgos
Guest
Here's a bit of trivia: the medieval library in which much of the plot of Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose takes place is modeled after the Robart's library. or so I was told by one of his friends.