'I wanted something that would last'At 89, an architect stands by his plan for City Hall after four decades of both condemnation and praiseIf you believe in Boston folklore -- that is, if you believe that the spirit of Mary Dyer haunts Boston Common and the ghost of the Lady in Black roams Georges Island and the curse of the Bambino hovers over Fenway Park -- then what about Boston City Hall?
Is there a pox on the building?
Exhibit 1: In the 1960s, wincing from criticism that the Prudential Center was misconceived, the city decided the designer of a new city hall would be chosen by competition. Four architects and three businessmen met at the Museum of Fine Arts, and after three days of judging, when a veil was lifted, the winning design was greeted by a few cheers, a few gasps, and a voice that said, "What the hell is that?" Exhibit 2: Eager to be the first mayor to occupy the building, John Collins, in the waning days of his administration in 1967, moved from old City Hall on School Street to the new $26 million cement structure that already had been ridiculed as looking like the crate Faneuil Hall came in. The building, months from completion, was cluttered with scaffolding. The escalator didn't work. The clock was four hours fast. The pen on the mayor's desk didn't write. And, alas, working in December in a building without heat, the mayor fell ill with pneumonia, was bedridden, and missed the inauguration of his successor, Kevin White.
Exhibit 3: After decades of debate about the drab gray ce- ment building designed in Brutalist Modern style by a group of three architects, and as Bostonians continue to adjust to City Hall's unusual architecture and baffling floor plan, not to mention the great expense to heat empty spaces that rise nine stories, a proposal was made this year by City Councilors John Tobin and Paul Scapicchio to sell City Hall and move the municipal offices to the Hynes Convention Center. A few weeks later, in the City Council chambers, an 80-pound mahogany panel came loose in the ceiling and plunged 30 feet, crashing on Scapicchio's desk and burying Tobin's in asbestos. "Cursed?" says Mayor Thomas M. Menino. "Nah, it's not cursed. C'mon, it's just had a bad beginning. It's a tough building, though, confusing, too much wasted space, expensive to heat, and it's modernistic and not typical of Boston." Ridiculed by lay people, City Hall is nevertheless admired by designers. In 1969, the American Institute of Architects chose Boston City Hall for an Honor Award. Writing in The New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable said Boston City Hall was magnificently monumental and "without a single one of those pompous pratfalls to the classical past." At the nation's bicentennial, in an AIA poll of architects, critics, and historians, Boston City Hall was judged to be tied with Boston's Trinity Church as the sixth proudest achievement in the history of American architecture. Continued... |
