How Boston City Hall was born (opens in new tab)

More totalitarian than absurdist. The whole idea seems to be elevating the vision of "The Genius Architect" over the needs and wishes of the people who would actually use the space, with a borderline contempt for what non-architects and even non-Brutalist architects think.

I'm reminded of the time I ended up crossing the Empire State Plaza in Albany once in the dead of winter. Such a horrid experience. Surrounded by soulless impersonal concrete with wind and snow blowing and howling. I felt like a freaking ant. It's not the type of architecture that inspires and uplifts in person. It psychologically oppresses and beats down.

Compare that to a place like Saint Peter's, which even as a non-Catholic almost took my breath away to experience in person.

City Hall is absurd in both it's appearance outside and the impracticality of the design and interior. Rooms with giant concrete columns that cut off sight lines, rampant maintenance problems from elevating form over function , and the comfort of a supraterrestrial civil defense shelter.

I’d encourage others to click on that link and do a 360. There are so many architectural styles with 200 yards.

The frog looking down upon you is displeased.

Yeah, it's friendly ugly. I'd be happy going to work there everyday.

Yeah, if you're going to make it ugly, make it newsworthy ugly. That thing is such an eyesore.

> Boston City Hall is objectively beautiful

This opinion puts you in a very small minority, to put it very kindly.

It is a poster child for the dystopian, a cubist insult to anyone who has the misfortune of laying eyes on it. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here".

Hmm, lived there for a long time and walked by Boston City Hall almost every day. I'm not quite sure how to differentiate objective beauty and subjective beauty, but at least subjectively, in my opinion, it's an eyesore.

Agreed on all fronts that City Hall Plaza is a disaster, though. I thought there were plans to revamp it with the Government Center station green line revamp a few years ago, but not sure if that improved anything.

I was born in Beantown and remember the site before construction (“Scollay Square”) as being pretty seedy and a place to avoid (still least for an eight year old). The new City Hall and Government Center were a huge improvement, and occurred during a period of rejuvenation for the city (addition to Boston Public Library, Copley Square expansion, final renewal of the city's red light district, aka the Combat Zone). I do remember the controversy of the design and public reaction — yes, it's not for everyone, but I've always had a fondness for the building.

Well just that it’s none of these things, as expressed by countless people, online and offline. It was voted as world’s ugliest building more than once etc. etc…

I love it. It's an underdog of expression surrounded by bland forgettable towers. Maybe that says more about the neighbors but the contrast is striking.

There's nothing objective about your personal preferences. It's an eyesore.

The whole plaza should be grass and trees, agree it would change the entire look.

I really appreciate how functional the building is. It's extremely visually distinct while having really engaging vertical elements (I've always thought it evoked waterfalls) and lacking the functional flaws I've seen with other highly visible architecture (I'm especially thinking of the Gehry Building at MIT - that's whimsical in appearance but an absolute nightmare of usability with awkward unusable interior spaces and a long legacy of mold and maintenance issues).

It's especially amusing that Boston City Hall is within a stone's throw of the only block that survived the fire of 1872 and throws a shadow over Faneuil Hall.

I like to think of it like a car wreck: no one actually enjoys looking at one, but you still have to look.

People who opposed demolishing the neighborhoods would be called NIMBYs today and would be blamed for the housing crisis. I'm not saying this to be snarky, just that there is a real push and pull there that I don't think is appreciated. There are some beautiful old neighborhoods near me which are at risk of being torn down and replaced with multi-unit dwellings. The residents say 'save our neighborhoods' and the activists cry 'greedy homeowners' and in the meantime the developers are rubbing their hands in anticipation of mountains of cash.

There's a WGBH podcast about the Big Dig and the first episode I think helps you appreciate why some of the interstate connections and routings around Boston are so weird. https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig

> It was in this context that the city decided to demolish the neighborhood known as Scollay Square

Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock) grew up in that neighborhood

Partly, it's definitely the combination of the building and the plaza. I don't know the history but it seems as if commerce (cafes and the like) haven't been especially welcome on the plaza though they'd admittedly only be attractive for 4-5 months out of the year.

Funny thing about the glass box. If you look down Tremont Street towards the bay you used to get a beautifully framed view of Old North Church. The sightline was considered a historical landmark (there's even a plaque for it in front of the Omni Parker House hotel). The Government Center station completely obstructed the view to Old North. Allegedly this is one of the main reasons that Government center is a glass box, it was the only way the construction was approved.

The glass box thing started here too: IM Pei's Hancock tower was one of the first, from the 1970s. And like many architectural wonders, the construction was crap. I can still remember going by and seeing all the boarded-up windows, because the glass kept falling out.

I've only seen it in photos, but to me it looks like the kind of place where a dystopian military dictatorship tortures its political prisoners. Or maybe like one of the army base levels from the original Quake, with its blocky polygons. I do see a certain charm in its architecture if I let myself enjoy the absurdity of it, but it does not seem fun to walk through all the useless empty space in front of it on a windy day with this thing looming over you.

It’s truly a building (and plaza) that has to be experienced in person to appreciate it. It certainly provokes emotion. An amazing place I’m glad to have experienced. But I’m also glad that most of the world is not like it.

I read a humor column once that had something to the effect of it was designed to be even more intimidating than Soviet architecture.

I actually like the building, but it does have that "Borg cube" feeling about it.

Yeah I've always thought that the point of much of the design was to have obvious places to put machine guns to mow down protesters.

Anytime i've brought my kids to that playground since that incident there is always someone either recreating or showing someone that video. The best exposure for a park really.

Architects design what their clients want, and their clients want "a bold statement" because that looks good on the planning documents and photographs.

If you want a well-designed building that works for the users, you can find architects to design that. It just won't be as well known because it'll work and do what it needs to do without pissing people off.

> That these two people see this as a work of art, instead of a practical thing that humans need to interface with

As a Boston resident that has had to conduct business at City Hall many times, I couldn't agree with this more. The lower level interior spaces are dark and somehow cavernous and confining at the same time, while the upstairs spaces are more of a warren of rooms and hallways. Nothing about walking in the front door makes you feel welcomed into the space. Either the actual use of the building was totally disregarded in its design, our our standards for how we expect to interact with buildings have dramatically changed since its construction.

Samuel Hughes at Works in Progress has been writing a bunch on this general topic recently.

Most relevant: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/making-architecture-easy/

The big idea is that some art styles are easy to appreciate without training and some aren't, and we probably shouldn't be making public architecture that's hard for members of the public to appreciate. Similarly atonal music isn't objectively bad, I often like it, but I recognize that it isn't appropriate to use in civic functions.

We don’t have skilled immigrant labor and the post WW2 boom made it difficult to win contracts with high quality building materials and artisans. The Hudson valley of New York had hundreds of brickyards until the 1950s and 60s. Bricks suck because they’re made in like two places, because construction is scaled and needs cheap materials.

There’s no good wood because wood < brick and we cut all of the trees down. So now the cheapest path is pumped concrete, so we build giant reinforced concrete and glass structures that will literally crumble in 70-100 years.

> Why can't we build nice things anymore?

Well.. first start by defining "beautiful", we're waiting. Also, it's a 50 year old structure.. we stopped building "nice" things after WW2 mostly because costs were astronomical and new materials and engineering opened up all kinds of avenues for more modern construction.

I've spent decent amount of time in and around Boston City Hall, the biggest problem with the building are:

1. The plaza in front of it is a damn wasteland. So much could be improved by building over the plaza and reestablishing the street grid here properly.

2. The Congress Street side facing Faneuil Hall is a concrete wall and a garage entrance. You probably can't fix the garage problem easily but the concrete wall with a proper structural engineer could probably reopened up.. of course, it would be expensive.

3. The interior while very interesting architecturally is really quite... I dunno, soul sucking. I kind of love the aesthetic inside but only from a "wow this looks cool" perspective.

The old city hall had a decorated cake look, but was a dysfunctional structure. There was nowhere to gather outside except the sidewalk. Entry was primarily through a large set of stairs that limited access. Once inside there was nowhere to gather, only a maze of narrow corridors servicing cramped offices with limited access to light and air.

The new city hall makes people angry and generates comments about totalitarianism, but it offers a range of places to gather inside and out and is extremely easy to navigate with internal spaces that have plenty of light and air. Brutalism may be an unpopular style, but the form itself has quite significant benefits.

Because architects went from building monuments to God and creation to building monuments to their own narcissism. Notre Dame (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Notre-Dame-de-Paris) was meant to be pleasing to God. And by implication, to man, because man was created in the image of God. Boston City Hall wasn't meant to be pleasing to anyone. It's more important to "make a statement" than to make something that is beautiful and uplifting.

Check out the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth campus, too, about 60 miles south of Boston