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 is frozen, where if you move one detail, you ruin everything,” adding, "The process of democratic government is the meaning of City Hall. It should never be finished.”

After falling in and out of fashion over the decades, the city hall was fully restored by Boston-based architects Utile in anticipation of its 50th anniversary in 2019. Aside from the city hall building, Kallmann McKinnell & Wood designed many buildings both within and outside the Boston region, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences building in Cambridge, the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank, the Back Bay Station, the city's Hynes Convention Center, the Dickinson and Company corporate headquarters in New Jersey, and the School of Business and Public Administration at Washington University in St. Louis, The Boston Globe reports.

In addition to being a world renowned architect, McKinnell was also a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). McKinnell taught for many years at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning.

In 1988, describing Kallmann McKinnell & Wood's buildings, Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell described the firm's buildings: “If there is a common theme, it is one of paradox and conflict. KMW’s buildings are never serene. There is usually, for one thing, a conflict between order and disorder in the floor plan, often in the sense that an orderly grid at the center disintegrates into something more random at the edges.”