My mom recommended that I read The Devil in the White City in advance of my recent trip to Chicago. So I did. And I liked it. Crime, history, architecture, the seam-bursting vitality of a great city: What’s not to like? Since the book sold quite well, a wave of copycat works—books that use criminous events to enliven straightforward history—is no doubt in the offing. Which is not a bad thing, either. (Already, the Chicago Architectural Foundation puts on a tour based on the book.)

ERIK LARSON. The Devil in the White City (2003).
History, indigestible in its raw form, is ultimately a matter of how you slice it. Larson cuts out two pieces of Chicago history, circa 1893, and juxtaposes them in a way that casts a dramatic shadow over the larger of the pair and an aura of significance over the smaller one. The big piece was the World’s Columbian Exposition, an epoch-defining convocation on the shore of Lake Michigan that introduced visitors to alternating-current electricity, the Ferris Wheel, Shredded Wheat, and the idea that the frontier era in U.S. history had come to a close. The relative small piece, in world-historical terms, was the homicidal career of Dr. Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H.H. Holmes, arguably the first American serial killer of the modern type. Holmes built a hotel, later known as his “murder castle,” not far from the fairground’s White City—an expanse of alabaster buildings, all designed in a Beaux Arts style by Daniel Burnham and his team of renowned architects. (Burnham’s struggles to plan and erect the fair’s physical plant occupy much of the book; Larson has perhaps an undue faith in his readers’ taste for stories of bureaucratic jousting.) Apart from that geographic coincidence, these stories have little connection to one another. But, in wedging them together with a sure narrative hand, Larson makes vivid a previously drab-seeming period of the American past.

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.

This week, in its “Innovators Issue,” the New Yorker reviews a book whose gist is that innovation isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. The true power of a technology, argues David Edgerton, author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, often emerges from the way people use it over a period that extends well past the “Eureka!” moment that spawned it. In his review, though, Steven Shapin emphasizes a deeper point about the products of our tool-wielding species: No less important than the creation of a piece of technology, or even its adaptation, is the work of maintaining it. That truth, chronically neglected, applies as well to our built environment.

One aspect of India that struck me with special force during my trip there early this year was the seeming lack of interest among Indians in the upkeep and repair of their existing physical infrastructure. New development and technological progress abound, but everything that isn’t new deteriorates. In Mumbai and Delhi, skyscrapers gleam overhead while sidewalks crumble underfoot. As Suketu Mehta writes in his book Maximum City, the nation now produces software engineers by the millions, yet home-owners go begging for a reasonably competent electrician.

What caught my notice during a trip to London in 2003, by contrast, was how sprightly and new that ancient city looked. I’d last seen the place in the 1980s, and in the interim the legions of Cool Britannia had tightened its screws, trimmed its ragged edges, swept away the sawdust, and given it a fresh coat of paint. There were shiny new structures, to be sure, but they impressed me far less than did the spit-polished appearance of neighborhoods that were once soot-gray, according to my Thatcher-era memories.

It’s a large subject—the care and feeding of a civilization and its artifacts—and I’ve idly thought that someone needs to write a book on it (to be titled “In Good Repair,” or some such). I won’t write it, but in any event here are a few notes toward such a work, from Shapin’s review essay.

Our obsession with innovation also blinds us to how much of technology is focussed on keeping things the same. The dikes of Holland maintain the integrity of the nation, and great ingenuity goes into preserving and improving them. We’re going to need a lot more, and more powerful, technologies of conservation: not just the technologies of levees and barriers against the ocean but technologies to maintain the supply of potable water, breathable air, and arable soil; technologies to maintain as much biodiversity as we can or want to maintain; technologies to preserve and renew our crumbling Victorian legacies of infrastructure (sewers, rail beds, roads, and bridges); technologies to stabilize and prevent the dispersal of radioactive waste. There may be hype attending new technological artifacts, but there’s money to be made, and spent, in maintaining them in usable shape. According to Edgerton, the take-home price of a P.C. is typically only about ten per cent of its lifetime cost, and sixty per cent of the lifetime cost of some military equipment is maintenance. The federal government spends twice as much on preserving highways as it does on building new ones. . . .

The importance of maintenance becomes even clearer if we take a global view. Edgerton notes that as things get older they tend to move from rich countries to poor ones, from low-maintenance to high-maintenance environments. In many African, South Asian, and Latin-American countries, used vehicles imported from North America, Western Europe, and Japan live on almost eternally, in constant contact with numerous repair shops. Maintenance doesn’t simply mean keeping those vehicles as they were; it may mean changing them in all sorts of ways—new gaskets made from old rubber, new fuses made from scrap copper wire. . . . Much of the world’s mechanical ingenuity is devoted to creating robust, reliable, and highly adapted “creole” technologies, an ingenuity that is largely invisible to us only because we happen to live in a low-maintenance, high-throwaway regime.

Maintenance has implications for the identity of technological artifacts. There’s a traditional conundrum about “my grandfather’s axe”: over its lifetime, it has had three new heads and four new handles, but—its owner insists—it remains his grandfather’s axe. Philosophers have their proprietary version of the axe problem: “Locke’s socks” developed a hole, which he had darned, and then darned again. The socks kept the philosopher’s feet warm, but they troubled his head. Many people make their living repairing things; a very few make their living pondering whether repaired things are the same. . . .

Why don’t more people ride city buses? Is it because the buses don’t feature wireless Internet service? Is it because there are, as yet, no “intelligent” bus stops—“[c]urved and gleaming like a Frank Gehry structure” and “wrapped in an LED ‘skin’ that can play video”? Not so much, I think.

The main piece (“Bus 2.0”) in the Boston Sunday Globe Ideas section this week surveys some big concepts in urban bus transport that have been rolling out of places like the Mobile Experience Laboratory at MIT. That brainy bus stop is one such idea. But the biggest of big concepts under review is “smart mobility,” or the notion that the key to improving the way cities move people around is to move data around more efficiently. GPS devices, goes the theory, will enable system managers to track buses with precision and riders to know precisely when the next bus will arrive at their stop. Networked vehicles will feed riders a stream of information—“from international news, to e-mail, to data about the passing neighborhoods.” And so on.

Now, before bus managers decide to invest in smart mobility, shouldn’t they give old-fashioned, unmodified mobility a try? Neither high concepts nor high technology will do much to fix the problems that beset public transit here in the greater Boston area. The author of the piece, Justin Peters, nods at that truth: “Much of the most innovative thinking now focuses on improving the passenger experience, instead of the more difficult challenge of moving buses faster through crowded city streets.” But he lets Federico Casalegno, director of the Mobile Experience Lab, hold forth at length on his vision of the bus voyage of tomorrow:

“The more communication that happens between citizens, the stronger the urban garden. . . .
“You transport people but don’t give any means for people to share anything else but their physical presence. If they had another way to be connected, they’d probably create smart communities.”

When I take the 66 Bus through Brookline and Boston on my way to work, the “physical presence” of my fellow passengers is presence enough, thank you very much. I don’t want meaningful relationships with them. Isolation, anonymity, being “alone in a crowd”—this is what makes “mobile experience” of the public-transit variety bearable. And viable.

There are two reasons why people, even those who willingly take rail-based public transit, don’t ride the bus if they can help it. (Okay, there’s a third reason: Everybody knows that riding the bus is for losers. But that “reason” basically derives from these other two.) The Globe Ideas article touches on both of them, ever so glancingly. First, unlike a trolley or a subway train, a bus lacks a dedicated right-of-way. Riding a bus, you’re just one schlump among a sea of schlumps caught in traffic—and, at that point, why not just take your own car? A subsidiary problem is that of “bus-bunching,” which the article refers to and which plagued the 66 route for a long stretch of weeks earlier this year. I’d wait at a stop for half an hour, and then three buses would roll up at once, conga-line fashion. These are matters of actual mobility, or lack of it, and making buses “smarter” will do only so much to address them.

Second—and this point, I concede, is very high-concept, with an emphasis on experience rather than mobility—buses and the bus lines that they traverse lack presence. A subway or light-rail line traces a permanent loop through a city, punctuating its course with stations that correspond to (or, indeed, create) urban landmarks: Times Square down in New York, Brigham Circle over in Boston, Coolidge Corner in my own dear Brookline. A bus, meanwhile, skitters through town as if it were ashamed of itself, pausing under duress at stops that are all but invisible. As the Globe piece notes, those who designed the MBTA’s newish Silver Line tried to lend it some presence by providing a dedicated lane for it and by creating named station stops  along the way. The Silver Line has received mixed reviews, I believe. But, with those measures, the “mobile experience” visionaries seem to be on the right track.