Move over, Paul Krugman. My former co-blogger describes Boston's City Hall as "a poured-concrete Vogon love poem".
Update A commenter suggests that the new Scottish Parliament building makes Boston's city hall look like Browning. We report, you decide:
Scottish Parliament building
Boston's City Hall
Excellent line, but probably more descriptive of the Scottish Parliament, next to which, Boston City Hall is the box it came in.
Nnnnnyyyyyuuuuuurrrrgggggghhhhhh!
A few years ago, I saw Virginia Postrel during her book for 'The Substance of Style'. During the Q & A, I asked her about trends in bad designs; she answered that there was a school of architecture called brutalism, whose name pretty much says it all.
I realize that it carries a different meaning in french, but can anyone seriously expect anything of aesthetic value to come from something called 'Brutalism'?
I like the description, "Neo-Maginot".
That photo of city hall doesn't do justice to the beauty of the building. It fails to capture the vast, empty, windswept expanse of stone and concrete amid which the building rests.
Wait, they moved the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI HQ) to Boston? How did I miss this?
The FBI HQ has to be the ugliest building I know of.
Wait, they moved the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI HQ) to Boston? How did I miss this?
The FBI HQ has to be the ugliest building I know of, except this Boston building - and I think Hoover takes the cake on "ugliest building" awards.
That's a good one. Insurance people and Londoners have said that the Lloyd's of London building is the "only beast with its intestines outside its skin and thousands of a**holes inside", or something like that.
While not as oppressively ugly as city hall, the Boston area also has MIT's new Strata Center, which looks less like a usable building than the daycare center at R'lyeh. (And, indeed, it leaks, is overpriced, and generally is semi-functional.) The fact that an engineering school erected such a monstrosity is a colossal demonstration of the abilities of university administrators to divert funds from education to monuments to themselves.
Watch My Architect for an interesting, different angle on Brutalism. Louis Kahn didn't build much, but the library in Exeter, NH and the parliament building in Bangladesh are amazing, beautiful examples of the style. And to hear the people in Bangladesh talk of their pride in that building is wonderful.
I rather like the Boston City Hall as pictured above. Maybe the surroundings make it horrible, but judging from the one image it looks sort of boxy-but-good in a Volvo kind of way.
I have seen very few buildings constructed in the second half of the twentieth century that I don't hate the sight of. For some reason many architects have decided that anything beautiful, symmetrical or ornamented should be rejected and replaced by asinine geometrical experiments. I notice this quite acutely when walking in downtown Albany where I can notice brutish modern blocks jammed in between elegant old brownstones.
The contrast is most painfully evident when one compares the New York State capitol and education buildings with the government complex built by the alien overlords who conquered New York in the late fifties... wait, it was the fascist regime that launched a successful coup... no, wait, it's just the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, which was presumably built so that the other rather elegant government buildings would have an ugly friend that they could seem more attractive in comparison to, even though they didn't need it.
On the subject of Brutalism, the UCSD Geisel Library is nice, at least in pictures. And the Barco Law Building can't be worse than the fourth or fifth ugliest important building on the Pitt campus.
While not as oppressively ugly as city hall, the Boston area also has MIT's new Strata Center, which looks less like a usable building than the daycare center at R'lyeh.
If it's any consolation, the Denver Art Museum was built in the same style, and is just as much of an eyesore -- and that on a block adjacent to the semicircular, classically-styled City & County building.
Maybe we should go back to limiting architects to stone and marble and whatever they can convince a stonemason or sculpturist to convert it into. It sure worked for the Greeks and Romans -- in part, no doubt, because you generally can't tell an actual artist to put months of his life into stonework, and then have it come out looking like a MAD magazine cartoon illustration of a freeze-frame shot taken 15ms after an insane Frank Gherry groupy initiates an artistic five megaton blast inside Ringling Brothers.
Many years back Menino had had the brilliant idea of having a big outdoor cafe on the roof, from which you could view the whole city except for its ugliest building.
Actually, those of us at MIT muttered under our breaths that the MIT Student Center and Boston City Hall must been designed by the same architect, who was obviously a maniac specializing in Defunct Aztec. We kept joking that Dukakis was going to come out and sacrifice someone on the ledge on the upper story.
Until I saw that photograph of Boston's city hall I was not aware that anyone was channeling Albert Speer.
the MIT building is called the Stata center (no R, named after Ray and Marie Stata)...
opinions on it are typically strong, and typically mixed. It is certainly odd, to say the least.
While I like the building - I see it every day, and think they did some very interesting stuff with the interior spaces - I like the concept of the building even more.
There are very few venues left for architecture that really pushes the boundaries as the Stata Center does. I appreciate that a university is willing to take a risk on such an enormous piece of art, something a public entity would have a lot of trouble doing. MIT is home to many oddly horrible (the student center, certainly) or oddly terrific buildings (the I.M. Pei designed chapel).