Saturday, January 27, 2007

Travel - the ugly building experience of Boston

One thing we want to see in Boston is a building both identified by the Project for Public Space as the worst public space in the world and by historians and architects as one of the greatest buildings in American history. This building is Boston's City Hall.

It is a massive concrete structure built in the 60's by Kallmann, McKinnell, and Knowles. This building is an example of brutalist architecture (regular geometic style). Bostonians describe the interior is a expansive, sterile void while the exterior is oppressive upside-down pyramid. In 2006, mayor Tom Menino proposed to sell the space and move City Hall to a site on the waterfront.

Any building that inspires so many strong feelings is one we have to go check out, if only to see it before it gets torn down.

Here's a picture from the side:

















And an areal image (thanks to google maps) showing the inverted pyramid.









No comments:

Post a Comment