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MASS Design Group has opened a new Gun Violence Memorial Project in the city of Boston that will amplify individual stories of our ongoing collective tragedy nationwide. The firm says the project "aspires to be a catalyst for change and a testament to the resilience of communities affected by gun... View full entry
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... View full entry
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. — Boston.com
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 &... View full entry
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... View full entry
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.
— CityLab
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... View full entry
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. — citylab.com
Related news on Archinect:Brutalism: the great architectural polarizerArt college professor suggests makeover for brutalist Boston City HallFuture of Paul Rudolph's brutalist Orange County building still uncertain View full entry
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... View full entry
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.
— The Boston Globe
Related:How Boston City Hall was bornGerhard Kallmann, Brutalist Architect, Dies at 97 View full entry
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. — nytimes.com
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... View full entry
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. — bostonglobe.com
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 View full entry
