Boston City Hall
Boston City Hall is the seat of city government of Boston, Massachusetts. It includes the offices of the mayor of Boston and the Boston City Council. The current hall was built in 1968 to assume the functions of the Old City Hall.
It is a controversial and prominent example of Brutalist architecture, part of the modernist movement. It was designed by the architecture firms Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles and Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty, with LeMessurier Consultants as engineers.
Together with the surrounding plaza, City Hall is part of the Government Center complex. This project was part of a major urban redesign effort in the 1960s that involved demolishing housing and businesses.
The building has been subject to widespread public condemnation and is sometimes called one of the world's ugliest buildings. Calls for the structure to be demolished have been regularly made even before construction was finished. Architects and critics considered it to be excellent work, with one poll from 1976 finding that professional architects describe Boston City Hall as one of the ten proudest achievements of American architecture. The building is a designated Boston Landmark.
Design
Boston City Hall was designed by Gerhard Kallmann, a Columbia University professor, and Michael McKinnell, a Columbia graduate student who co-founded Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles. In 1962, they won an international, two-stage design competition for the building. Their design, selected from 256 entries by a jury of prominent architects and businessmen, departed from the more conventional designs of most of the other entries to introduce an articulated structure that expressed the internal functions of the buildings in rugged, cantilevered concrete forms. While hovering over the broad brick plaza, the City Hall was designed to create an open and accessible place for the city's government, with the most heavily used public activities all located on the lower levels directly connected to the plaza. The major civic spaces, including the Council chamber, library, and Mayor's office, were one level up, and the administrative offices were housed above these, behind the repetitive brackets of the top floors.At a time when monumentality was typically considered an appropriate attribute for governmental architecture, the architects sought to create a bold statement of modern civic democracy, placed within the historic city of Boston. While the architects looked to precedents by Le Corbusier, especially the monastery of Sainte Marie de La Tourette, with its cantilevered upper floors, exposed concrete structure, and a similar interpretation of public and private spaces, they also drew from the example of Medieval and Renaissance Italian town halls and public spaces, as well as from the bold granite structures of 19th-century Boston.
Many of the elements in the design have been seen as abstractions of classical design elements, such as the coffers and the architrave above the concrete columns. Kallmann, McKinnell, and Knowles collaborated with two other Boston architectural firms and one engineering firm to form the "Architects and Engineers for the Boston City Hall" as the entity responsible for construction, which took place from 1963 to 1968.
The architects designed City Hall as divided into three sections, aesthetically and also by use. The lowest portion of the building, the brick-faced base, which is partially built into a hillside, consists of four levels of the departments of city government, where the public has wide access. The brick largely transfers over to the exterior of this section, and it is joined by materials such as quarry tile inside. The use of these terra cotta products relates to the building's location on one of the original slopes of Boston, expressed in the open, brick-paved plaza, and also to historic Boston's brick architecture, seen in the adjoining Sears Crescent block and the Blackstone Block buildings across Congress Street.
The intermediate portion of City Hall houses the public elected officials: the Mayor, the City Council members, and the Council Chamber. The large scale and the protrusion of these interior spaces on the outside, instead of being buried deep within the building, reveal the important public functions to the passers-by and are intended to create a visual and symbolic connection between the city and its government. The effect is of a small city of concrete-sheltered structures cantilevered above the plaza: large forms that house important civic activities. The cantilevers are supported by exterior columns, spaced alternately at and, which are steel-reinforced.
The upper stories contain the city's office space, which are used by civil servants not visited frequently by the public, such as the administrative and planning departments. The bureaucratic nature is reflected in the standardized window patterns, separated by pre-cast concrete fins, with an open office plan typical of modern office buildings.
The top of the brick base was designed as an elevated courtyard melding the fourth floor of the city hall with the plaza. Security concerns caused city officials in recent years to block access to the courtyard and the outdoor stairways to Congress Street and the plaza. The courtyard is occasionally opened up for events. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, security was further increased. The north entrance, facing the plaza, was barricaded with jersey barriers and bicycle racks. All visitors entering the front and the back entrances must pass through metal detectors.
City Hall was constructed by using mainly cast-in-place and precast Portland cement concrete and some masonry. About half of the concrete used in the building was precast, and the other half was poured-in-place concrete. All of the concrete in the structure, except that of the columns, is mixed with a light, coarse rock. While the majority of the building is created using concrete, precast and poured-in-place concrete are distinguishable by their different colors and textures. For example, cast-in-place elements are coarse and grainy textured because the concrete was poured into fir wood frames to mold it, and precast elements, such as trusses and supports, were set in steel molds to gain smooth, clean surfaces. This distinction also originates from the different types of cement used: the exterior poured-in-place pieces are of type I cement, a lightly colored cement, while the exterior precast components use type II cement, a dark-colored cement. The base of the building is dark with brick, Welsh quarry tiles, mahogany walls, and darker concrete. As the building ascends, the overall color lightens, as lighter concrete is used.
Reception
The public response to Boston City Hall continues to be sharply divided. Arguments for and against continued use of the structure provoke strong counter-arguments from politicians, local press, design professionals, and the general public. City Hall was given two stars by the Michelin Green Guide, which said that the building "has been one of Boston's controversial architectural statements since its completion in 1968." The building's 50th anniversary in 2019 prompted both positive and negative commentary. In the 2021 Boston mayoral election, candidates for mayor Andrea Campbell, John Barros, and Kim Janey voiced negative opinions on it, Annissa Essaibi George was neutral on it, while Michelle Wu voiced positive opinions on it.Positive
While assessment of the building's architecture has been influenced by the vagaries of changing architectural style, the building at the time was acclaimed by some architects as well as by the professional association, American Institute of Architects, which gave the building its Honor Award in 1969.Representative of the contemporary praise was the opinion of The New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who wrote that "in this focal building Boston sought, and got, excellence." Historian Walter Muir Whitehill wrote that
it is as fine a building for its time and place as Boston has ever produced. Traditionalists who long for a revival of Bulfinch simply do not realize that one does not achieve a handsome monster either by enlarging, or endlessly multiplying, the attractive elements of smaller structures.
Architect, educator, and writer Donlyn Lyndon wrote in The Boston Globe, "Boston City Hall carries an authority that results from the clarity, articulation, and intensity of imagination with which it has been formed." Architectural historian Douglass Shand-Tucci, author of Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800–2000, called City Hall "one of America's foremost landmarks" and "arguably the great building of twentieth-century Boston." In the AIA Guide to Boston, Susan and Michael Southworth wrote that "the award-winning City Hall had established its architect's reputation and inspired similar buildings across the nation."
Stylistically, City Hall is considered by some to be a leading example of Brutalist architecture. It is listed among the "Greatest Buildings" by Great Buildings Online, an affiliate of Architecture Week. Additionally, in a 1976 Bicentennial poll of historians and architects regarding the United States' greatest buildings, sponsored by the American Institute of Architects, Boston City Hall received the sixth-most mentions.
When Boston's Mayor Menino stirred controversy in 2010 with a discussion of selling City Hall, opponents of the proposal expressed praise of the building for its influence, design originality, and symbolism as a marker of Boston's rebirth in the 1960s. Supporters of the building applied to the Boston Landmarks Commission for its designation as a landmark, with supporting signatures and letters from architecture critic Jane Holtz Kay, Friends of the Public Garden President Henry Lee, and others. The Boston Globe published editorials recognizing the building's importance. Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote an article published in The Wall Street Journal in which she contrasted the poor treatment of Boston City Hall with Yale University's recent sympathetic restoration of its similarly challenging Brutalist landmark, the Art and Architecture Building by architect Paul Rudolph.
In 2009 a major exhibition of the original design drawings for City Hall, now part of the archive of Historic New England, was mounted at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. In 2015, Boston Globe columnist Dante Ramos wrote that "if we see the enduring value in Heroic-era architecture, we can also hope for a measure of boldness — and recognize the downside of being too timid." In 2018, Boston Magazine ranked City Hall as #1 on its list of the 100 best buildings in the city. A 2019 essay by Anthony Flint argued that City Hall is "an elegant, successful work of architecture." In 2019, a commemorative pin was produced in honor of the building's 50th anniversary. In an essay written during the anniversary year, architect Aaron Betsky wrote that City Hall "is one of the last concrete examples of government willing to fight for what it thinks is right, which is, or should be, or common good."