Archinect - News

Construction update: Halfway there for Sasaki's Boston City Hall Plaza upgrade despite a slate of unforeseen obstacles

2021-08-09T20:23:00-04:00

It’s been a year since former Mayor Marty Walsh announced the start of renovations to City Hall Plaza and work is about halfway complete, despite unexpected obstacles.

The renovation is the brainchild of former Boston mayor (and current Secretary of Labor) Marty Walsh, who promised an 18–24-month construction period when the project was announced in 2019. The barren 7-acre plaza has long been an object of derision in the city after the McKinnell & Kallman-designed Brutalist building opened in 1968.

Site plan of the plaza overhaul. Image courtesy Sasaki.

Sasaki is leading the $70 million redesign which will add green space, children's play areas, and a promenade to a more accessible City Hall Plaza.

Boston.com has more on the renovation’s progress here.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sasaki (@sasakidesign)

Boston City Hall is turning 50, and there's a commemorative pin to celebrate the Brutalist icon

2019-02-19T14:15:00-05:00

The city’s most polarizing building is now officially middle-aged and a couple of fans have reproduced a pin that was given out during its opening week celebrations in 1969 [...] Joyce Linehan, chief of policy for Boston’s Mayor Marty Walsh, still has an original pin, which local designers Chris Grimley and Shannon McLean used as the basis for a reproduction.

Commemorative pin and letter press drawing card. Image via OverUnder's website

"Cast in bronze and hand patina’d, the commemorative lapel pin is produced in a limited edition of fifty," reads the pin's description on the website of OverUnder, the Boston-based architecture and design firm behind the commemorative initiative.

"Included with each pin is a unique numbered letterpress card that reproduces one of the original competition sketches for the building. Printed with gold ink, and signed in gold by Michael McKinnell, architect of the building, the set is a unique memento that celebrates Boston, City Hall and their concrete legacy."

The pin and card set is available for $250 here.

New movement urges to call Brutalism 'Heroic' instead

2015-11-25T12:17:00-05:00

There’s the legacy of Brutalism being such a negative term. It begins the conversation with negativity about these buildings, and this falls into the misreading of them as harsh, Stalinist, or some other kind of monstrous, mean architecture. The name plays into that mischaracterization that’s grown around a lot of them. I think “Heroic’” is a better title for what their actual aspirations were. The architects had a real sense of optimism. They were developing architecture for the civic realm.

Gerhard Kallmann, Brutalist Architect, Dies at 97

2012-06-26T18:01:00-04:00

Gerhard Kallmann, the architect who, with Michael McKinnell, designed Boston City Hall, a hulking, asymmetrical, Modernist building that has been widely acclaimed by architects for half a century though disparaged by many Bostonians, died on Tuesday in Boston. He was 97.