Archinect - News

Inside the expensive repair of Brutalist landmark Boston City Hall

2023-07-07T11:41:00-04:00

Local Boston news outlet WBUR has offered an insight into the multi-million dollar operation to repair and renew Boston City Hall. The Brutalist icon, now 55 years old, was recently allocated $80 million to address ongoing issues.

The most extensive renewal project to be undertaken in the building is the removal and replacement of the original hot water pipes dating from the 1960s. As WBUR reports, many of the pipes are inaccessible and completely encased in concrete.

"We've actually had to core into that concrete just to be able to repair and actually identify the leak," Boston’s commissioner of property management Eamon Shelton told the outlet. As a result, the city has budgeted $13.5 million for the pipes project alone.

Other repair and renewal projects include the replacement of all lights in the building with energy-efficient LEDs, plans to...

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)

Michael McKinnell, co-designer of Boston's Brutalist City Hall, dies from COVID-19

2020-03-30T12:59:00-04:00

Michael McKinnell, a co-designer of Boston's love-it-or-hate-it Brutalist City Hall, has passed away from pneumonia following a positive diagnosis for COVID-19.

McKinnell was born in 1935 in Manchester, England and grew up during World War II. He earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1958 from the University of Manchester in England and later attended Columbia University as a Fulbright scholar, earning an M.Arch degree there in 1960. Two years later, McKinnell and Columbia assistant professor Gerhard Kallmann joined forces to enter a competition for the design of Boston's new city hall. Their unexpected victory, both were unlicensed and neither had designed a building on their own at that point, served as a launching pad for Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, a practice that would go on to practice for decades to wide acclaim.

The Boston Globe reports that in 1969 McKinnell, describing his vision for the city hall building, told a reporter, "This isn’t a building where the pattern ...

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.

Editor's Picks #426

2015-08-10T09:55:00-04:00

Julia Ingalls reviewed "Work on Work" the current exhibition at Los Angeles’ Architecture + Design Museum, co-organized by Gensler and UCLA’s cityLAB.

Therein she writes "This feeling of being at an un-airconditioned business conference is not helped by the next section of the exhibit, in which the banners stop talking about history and start getting real about Gensler and cityLAB's speculation on the future of the work environment...the privileged and oversimplified overtones of the exhibit, paired with its refusal to envision a more distinguished balance between productivity and (unstructured, unmonitored, human) downtime make it a bit chilling."

Amelia Taylor-Hochberg Editorial Manager for Archinect dissects the upcoming monographic LACMA (by way of the Pompidou) “Frank Gehry” exhibition, opening September 13. Responding to her question about critical distance given Gehry’s involvement, midlander writes "It's inherently difficult to create a critical exhibit on a living architect....

Art college professor suggests makeover for brutalist Boston City Hall

2015-07-27T13:26:00-04:00

Some architects consider the design a stunning example of the modern Brutalist style, but for many Bostonians it’s the building they have long loved to hate. [...] why can’t we make changes that are easily reversible, while simultaneously acting to protect and preserve the structure? Here’s one simple, obvious and cost-effective solution: Sheath the building with a tinted glass curtain wall — but not to create another modernist glass box.

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.

Editor's Picks #250

2012-02-12T23:32:00-05:00

Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay suggested some ways of Designing a Fix for Housing, beginning with rethinking our historic commitment to detached, single-family homes and segregated Euclidean zoning. Louis Arleo agreed that we need to redesign suburbia but argued "however suburbia will never be improved until architects embrace the idea of a developers business model."

Anthony Carfello, analyzed Los Angeles media’s failings in their role as "the de facto voice" of AEG’s development plans for Farmers Field in Farmers Field: Bringing Football Back on a Need-to-Know Basis. Carfello contended "The existing biases, the assumptions in play, the prized status of CEQA exemption, the traffic, the legitimate fiscal drawbacks weighed against any foreseeable benefits (to the non-AEG public), and greater questions of diversity of primary uses in downtown’s future buildings all beg for further dialogue."and then offered up (323) Projects as an alternative model of citizen discourse.

In the latest addition to the CONTOURS: series Sherin Wing touched on some of the ways various changes taking place in architecture firms with regards to compensation and valuatization, are a result of the "realization that employees are people, not just ‘workers’ or ‘laborers’." in On Business and Bosses.

Gregory Walker commented he would like Sherin to "come on here and enga...

How Boston City Hall was born

2012-02-10T19:16:00-05:00

Whatever else you might think about it, Boston City Hall is an improbable building. Call it a giant concrete harmonica or a bold architectural achievement, but to walk by this strange, asymmetrical structure in Government Center is to wonder how on earth it landed there.

Fifty years after a groundbreaking competition, two architects look back at the project that polarized the city — and gave it a new lease on life