Dog Bites Man: Another AIA Award Winner To Meet the Wrecking Ball

BOSTON CITY HALL and the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex won national awards from the American Instiute of Architects.  The second has been torn down and the first is apparently to be sold, and then torn down. The third thing they have in common is that the architects of both buildings assumed that traditional urbanism was dead and the city needed to be reinvented. In the intervening years, however, we've discovered that traditional urbanism is better than the new inventions.

Pruitt-Igoe's architecture was ugly and dehumanizing. Boston City Hall's architecture was brutal and dehumanizing. But even more important was their lack of respect for the city. Pruitt-Igoe created a "public realm" that fostered crime. Boston's City Hall Plaza is a place from which people flee. As James Howard Kunstler has said in a different context, there's not enough Prozac in the world to make pedestrians in the shadow of Boston City Hall feel comfortable.

Boston mayor proposes selling city hall
Tue Dec 12, 2006 12:49 PM ET
By Kevin McNicholas

BOSTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) - Boston's 38-year-old City Hall, a vast, concrete Modernist structure in the heart of the downtown, should be sold and moved to a growing waterfront district, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said on Tuesday.

Menino estimated the value of City Hall and its surrounding brick plaza -- cited by one nonprofit group as the ugliest public space in the world -- at more than $300 million.

The mayor said it should be sold to private developers with proceeds funneled into a new seat for city government in South Boston.

"The sale will open up prime real estate for facilities and open space that will galvanize the vitality of our downtown," Menino said in a speech. "The demand for downtown development is stronger than it ever has been."

Bostonians often curse their City Hall as a drab, gray architectural blight designed in Brutalist Modern style. Many find the thick, blocky structure jarring and out of sync with the city's Colonial traditions of brick and granite buildings.

In January, the nonprofit Project for Public Spaces deemed City Hall Plaza as the most unsightly public space in the world, according to its list of "The 16 Squares Most Dramatically in Need of Improvement."

"This is one of the most disappointing places in America," it said.

Still, the design by Cambridge architects Kallman McKinnell & Knowles has won praise by architects. In 1969, the American Institute of Architects chose Boston City Hall for an Honor Award, a year after construction ended.

(continued)

Menino said he explored the idea of selling it in 1998 but that market conditions were not right at the time. "I knew then how expensive the building was and how many expensive updates it would need in the years ahead," he said in the speech.

He said the new City Hall would be a "model of green design and construction" and he hoped construction would begin in about a year-and-a-half and last four to five years.

After languishing for decades, development on the South Boston Waterfront is picking up. Hundreds of millions of dollars of public money has been invested in a convention center, a highway and interchange, and a subway line.

On Sunday, Boston's first new museum in nearly a century opened near the site of the proposed city hall.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, a glass-and-steel box that offers an expansive view of the city and harbor, has been widely praised and drew thousands of visitors on its opening day

© Reuters 2006.

Boston Mayor Suggest Selling City Hall
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 12, 2006

Filed at 11:54 a.m. ET

BOSTON (AP) -- Boston Mayor Thomas Menino proposed selling City Hall to private developers Tuesday in a move he said would ''galvanize the vitality of our downtown.''

A new City Hall could be built on a city-owned site at the South Boston waterfront, Menino said.

''This sale will open up prime real estate for facilities and open space that will galvanize the vitality of our downtown and strengthen Boston's future,'' Menino said, outlining the plan during a breakfast event sponsored by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.

The hulking City Hall building, which opened in 1968, is jarringly out of place with Boston's historic colonial architecture and has long been considered an eyesore at the site across from Faneuil Hall.

In his speech, Menino said the City Hall building is inefficient and needs numerous expensive updates.

Menino also explored the possible sale of City Hall in 1998. ''But at that time, the market conditions were not right,'' he said Tuesday. ''Today, however, the demand for downtown development is stronger than it has ever been.''

© 2006 AP News.