Boston City Hall: The ideology behind the infamous landmark
This is a post I wrote for the blog at Design Museum Boston. It’s part of a series on Boston City Hall.
“Architecture is not about self-expression,” said Gerhard Kallmann, the architect who, along with partner Michael McKinnell, designed Boston City Hall. Unlike painting and sculpture, architecture rarely wears its message on its sleeve. Though architectural movements are fraught with ideology, the average citizen, government bureaucrat, or mayor isn’t likely to read the story of decades of architectural and sociological debate in the design of one of the city’s most unloved buildings. It may come as a surprise to some that City Hall, a building often described as dark, damp, and poorly ventilated stems from a tradition that sought to create utopian communities and facilitate more hygienic lifestyles for all.
The Brutalist style, so called after the French term for raw concrete (beton brut) was pioneered by Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect responsible for many modernist landmarks in Europe and Asia (though his only North American work was 1963’s Carpenter Center at Harvard University). Buildings like Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation (finished 1952), a Marseille housing tower that included shops and services along a “street in the sky” on the seventh and eighth floors, sought to create safe, clean villages closed off from crime and smoggy streets below. [See image below.] The raw concrete style was deemed “honest,” un-bourgeois, and was relatively affordable to boot. The lack of traditional ornament in Brutalist structures only contributed to the “honest” aspect of the design—these architects avoided any structure or design that in some way masked the functions of the buildings they designed. 
Kallmann absolutely adhered to the idea that architecture should be “programmatic”—that is, designed only to support a building’s function, without the architect’s artistic motifs applied in a way that doesn’t support or enhance those functions. In a 2004 interview with the Boston Globe, Kallmann said he and McKinnell were “not interested in abstract space exercises or special sensation, but in establishing a space and identity for the human being who works in a particular context.” Like other Brutalists, he similarly avoided using historical styles just for aesthetic purposes. In an article entitled “Action Architecture,” published before the 1961 competition held by the mayor’s office to find a design for city hall, Kallmann wrote that he strove for a “new” solidity—instead of the geometric, symmetrical forms of classicism, or the weightless, all-glass look of early modernism, he sought “a levitation of masses in which there are now only degrees of density, ranging from apparent solidity through hollowness or openness to complete attenuation of the void.”
The building is absolutely a product of its time—said Kallmann in 2004, “Remember, this was the time of optimism, of Jack Kennedy. We wanted a modern building that acknowledges surroundings and also long-past history in the recall of ancient precedents, of ramparts and templelike structures. It wasn’t just minimalist modern architecture. Besides, if we made a square, glass building, it would have looked like any other corporation office.”
Some aspects of City Hall’s design are rather literal, to those in the know. The middle floors, which are emphasized with larger windows and protruding forms, house the mayor’s and city council’s chambers. Below, at ground level, multi-story archways and openings represent a transparent and welcoming government to citizens arriving for business. On the upper level, where the windows and other elements of the façade are placed on an even, repetitive grid, the bureaucratic agencies are housed. “The discipline of the upper structure, in contrast to the variety of places and fascination of shape at the pedestrian level, has been described as ‘a brilliant demonstration of the principle of order in the sky and tumult on the ground,” said the architectural historian Paul Heyer in praise of the hierarchical layout of the building.
The idea that such a heavy, imposing building could represent transparency might seem a bit counterintuitive. Said Kallmann, “In the design of our building, the very first idea was accessibility of government. To have accessibility, a building need not be of glass architecture, which is more appropriate for shops, where you want to display things. A building can be accessible and permeable by other means. City Hall was meant as an extension of the city streets. In sketches, we showed passage through the building and down to Dock Square. When the riots of the 1960s came, the doors were closed.” Other more friendly elements of the building’s original design were quashed as well. A beer garden, planned for the ground floor of the building, was prohibited by the federal government. Other balconies and courtyards, once open to the public, have been barricaded for security reasons. Even a fountain, on the brick plaza in front of the building, was filled with cement after years of breakdowns and faulty machinery.
Though loved by architects and historians for its place in modern history, the barren brick plaza surrounding the building and the deteriorating, poorly-ventilated interiors of City Hall have inspired criticisms from City Hall employees, urban planners, community activists, and everyday citizens alike. Always a topic of debate and a candidate for reform, it seems that in the current economic climate, City Hall won’t be relocating or getting torn down anytime soon.
