You can’t fight City Hall. But you can fight over City Hall. And now, it seems, a squabble is unfolding in Boston over whether to raze and replace the current seat of the city’s government—
the wretched, Sixties-era slab that squats in Government Center Plaza, like an ugly concrete frog on a forbidding concrete lily pad. It’s a building that many Bostonians, very much including myself (a former Boston resident and a current observer from the “town” next door), love to hate. But the idea of actually doing something about it began gathering steam a short while ago, after Mayor Thomas Menino proposed tearing the thing down and building a new civic center near the rejuvenated South Boston waterfront.
To which I say: Bring on the demolition derby. It’s time to get medieval on that hulking excrescence of late modernity—time to get brutal with that monument to architectural Brutalism.
I haven’t been following the debate over Menino’s ambitious idea, but I’m amazed to discover—in the Boston Sunday Globe Ideas section—that serious people object to it on grounds other than cost. These people are professional architects, and, well, I wish there were a less philistine way to say what needs to be said: Architecture is too important to be left to members of the AIA (American Institute of Architects). Some defenders of the 1969 building, a recent report indicates, have even begun a campaign to designate it a legally protected historic landmark.
George Thrush, director of the school of architecture at Northeastern University, writes today in his Ideas piece:
Boston City Hall’s supporters are committed to both the architectural and political legacy of the building. And this is understandable.
From an architectural standpoint, there is also a real sense that the current City Hall is serious architecture. The product of an international design competition, the building shows little of the compromise that we associate with the design of public buildings today. And it is true that Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles’ award-winning design was an all too rare marriage of the political and cultural spirit of the age with real architectural talent.
But that marriage, strong as it was at the time, has failed utterly. And the near desperation with which some in the architectural community are rallying around this building suggests an unwillingness to face this. It also suggests a deep pessimism—that we can no longer expect new public buildings to be great works of architecture. It suggests that only in the days of the unquestioned “hero architect” could we aspire to excellence. I disagree.
City Hall is an interesting building, to be sure, and architecturally important too. But this location is more important. To insist that the preservation of this building is critical to our future is to see that future in the narrowest way. It is to imagine that Boston had vision just once in recent memory—in the 1960s.
Thrush, whom I interviewed for a class reporting project a couple of years ago, is a good urbanist. He understands (better than I do, of course) the value of a clear and sustained street wall, the need for pedestrian pathways that knit parts of a city together, the virtue of density, and the magic of mixed-use development. And thus he lands on the right side of the fight between “saving City Hall” as it stands and rescuing the ideal of a city hall as a place that draws people to it.
But he concedes far too much, alas, in saying that the current City Hall is “interesting” and “architecturally important.” Interesting and important to whom? Not to anyone whose eye remains uncorrupted by Miesian professional dogma. A building exists within a context of urban use and enjoyment. Unlike a painting or a scupture, it can’t earn its keep as a museum piece—as an artifact in its own right, as a testament to an artist’s conceit. If people don’t enjoy it, if they use it only with difficulty and only under duress, there’s no reason to preserve it.
In fact, there may be one reason: In the case of Boston’s City Hall, it may contain so much concrete that the cost of bulldozing it would bleed the civic treasury dry.
