Great idea! Never happen, Part 1
No one can fault Boston Mayor Tom Menino for thinking small — when I read this Boston Globe story, I had two reactions totaling four words:
Mayor Thomas M. Menino, saying he wants to make a statement that will lead Boston into the future, announced he intends to build an “architecturally magnificent” City Hall on the South Boston waterfront, an undertaking that would turn over to developers the current controversial behemoth on City Hall Plaza and shift the locus of city government to a more remote outpost of the city.
“This new building will bring together the city’s past and its future, at a site that unites the history of our harbor with the promise of tomorrow’s
A cheerful open-eyed facade on
“Great idea!” I thought to my surprise. “Never happen.”
Even from a distance, it looks gaunt and abandoned
The mayor’s proposal is interesting in its own right, and worthy of deeper study for the principles it reveals about:
1. The evolution of cities.
2. The consequences of bad construction design.
3. Government’s role in fostering urban redevelopment
4. The renewal of very old affordable housing properties via subsidy portage.
Shall we?
May I have the honor of this blog post?
“Great idea!”
It’s a great idea, for several reasons:
1. Moving it would publicly commit the city to redeveloping
As I’ve previously written, in urban revitalization, government must lead, and one of the most effective ways to anchor a political commitment in a new space is to move the seat of government there. The Founding Fathers did that when they created Washington DC, and just as moving the capital (Karachi, Pakistan to Islamabad; Canberra, Australia as the compromise between Sydney and Melbourne; Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia) both signals change and commits a government to it. In the same way, moving city hall commits a city to new growth:
Vivien Li, executive director of the Boston Harbor Association, called Menino’s proposal “bold” and said she was “pleased to welcome the mayor to the part of the city that’s going to be the 21st century.”
When the alpha male of government moves, the herd observes:
Bruce Berman of the nonprofit group Save the Harbor/Save the Bay said he started getting phone calls from people “within four minutes” of Menino’s speech.
“They said this could change everything if it happens,” said Berman. “What a spectacular and very public use for the harbor,” he said. “City Hall during the day and the Pavilion at night.”
2. The City would make money and get a better building.
The wide boulevard extending north is
That city investment could pay very handsome financial dividends. As another Globe sidebar observes:
Selling the present City Hall, which squats on a corner of nine prime acres of real estate, would offer developers an unprecedented opportunity to fill a hole in downtown. While
That’s a huge sum, almost $45,000,000 an acre, or over $1,000 per square foot for raw land.
$1,000 apiece for undeveloped land!
… real estate executives declined to put a price tag on it because its value depends on what the city allows to be built there.
In other words, the city has the power to ratchet up its profit, by allowing the present (incredibly low density and low economic use) site to be more densely — and valuably — developed:
“It’s enormous, and I’d hate to even speculate,” said Rob Griffin, president of Cushman & Wakefield of Massachusetts Inc. “To aggregate nine acres in the center of the city like that would be unheard of.”
City Hall is the square open rectangle, and the empty red space is the additional plaza
Because the value of urban land is the net after-development value of what property can be developed on it, with the continuing revival of new-urbanist cities, the sky’s the limit:
“I almost fell out of my seat,” David I. Begelfer, chief executive of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties‘ regional chapter, said after Menino unleashed his stunning announcement at the Chamber breakfast yesterday morning. “The competition for this site will be international — it’s the most valuable piece of property in
With
3. The city could move easily. The city already has land it can put to use:
The city already owns 13 acres of land at Drydock Four, southeast of the World Trade Center, which it rents to the Bank of America Pavilion concert facility.
It’s nice and everything, but both low density and low usage
Another incredibly low density, low economic value usage.
Menino said he would like to see the pavilion remain on the property after the new City Hall is built. Boston Redevelopment Authority officials yesterday estimated that selling the current City Hall property would generate enough money to finance a $300 million environmentally friendly structure that Menino predicted would be “architecturally magnificent.”
4. The current City Hall is an awful building, and always has been. In my novel In the Cube, which imagined
The Brutalist style concrete City Hall of the present has been the butt of jokes and an object of scorn for decades, even as it wins continuing praise from architects and critics. But confronted with the possibility of losing it, some spoke with nostalgia yesterday.
“It is ugly, but it’s just something that’s always been there,” said Paula Bakerian, 35, a native Bostonian. “That’s like trying to rip down
To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I’ve been to
You’re more of a Metrodome, senator
In addition to the looming gulag presence of City Hall, the plaza itself has never worked as an urban space; it’s too open, too empty, there is neither reason to cluster nor delight in sitting. People cross it in a hurry, as if passaging a wasteland, and it’s no surprise that virtually every single tourist photo shows it empty of people. The plaza and the building reinforce each other’s inhospitality.
It’s hard to believe now, but in a poll of architects and historians in the bicentennial year of 1976, the building was voted one of the 10 greatest works of architecture in American history.
No way would that happen today. And even back then, the building was a lot more popular with architects than it was with the public.
The architects liked it because it was avant-garde. As the Globe noted:
The style was derived from the late work of the most famous architect of that era, Le Corbusier.
Sorry, that’s really ugly, too.
Corbusier’s love of raw concrete was inspired by his discovery of World War II pillboxes on the coast of
Nancy and I have also been to the
But La Tourette is modest in scale. Blown up to the proportions of City Hall, Brutalism does become brutal. From the beginning, most people found it intimidating.
Any resemblance to the Gates of Mordor is purely coincidental
Some architects design based on drawings and maquettes, not thinking about the occupants:
Those who admire the building sometimes argue that architecture doesn’t have to be beautiful to be great.
For them, City Hall is an ugly, wonderful, powerful, unforgettable building.
Don’t hate me because I’m butt-ugly.
Menino has long disliked the present City Hall, a massive concrete building that some have compared to a prison, along with the windswept expanse of brick that surrounds it. His past attempts to improve it — a proposed restaurant, a roof garden to help regulate its extremes in temperature — mostly fell short, and two previous attempts to relocate fizzled. But Menino says he is now committed.
Since my company Recap often does business with various City departments, most notably the BRA, I have from time to time attended meetings in City Hall.
The powerful outward thrust of the middle floors, as seen from outside, is the architects’ way of letting you know that these floors are occupied by the important people, namely the mayor and the city council. But they look not so much important as aggressive, even threatening.
Would you really want to find your way in to that?
Inside, it is a pit. Long bland gray and white corridors, narrow and lightless, lead to boxlike offices. It’s a truly miserable space in which to work, and I pity those whose days are spent in its rectangular bowels:
The biggest problem with City Hall, though, is the interiors. Indoor walls made of gray concrete, often without much natural daylight, are depressing. And there are a lot of them.
And small rooms, and low ceilings, and long corridors. As the Globe snickered in its brief life history of City Hall:
1967
City government begins a two-year process of moving to the $26 million concrete structure at
This is the face City Hall turns to Faneuil Hall
Now that’s a building.
(For benefit of non-Bostonians, Faneuil rhymes with channel.)
Mayor John Collins, working in an office with no heat, comes down with pneumonia and misses the inauguration of his successor, Kevin White.
Kevin White, now a bronze statue adjacent to Faneuil Hall
As Noah Cross said in
1969
The American Institute of Architects chooses
No pompous pratfalls here
The patrician Ms. Huxtable notwithstanding,
Then why did I instinctively react that it will never happen?
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
