Is Brutalism Back? Boston City Hall Designated Official Historical Landmark

These are strange and unaccountable days. The most misunderstood, the most unpopular — perhaps even the most reviled — architectural movement of the twentieth century is on the cusp of a revival. Re-appraised by the old guard and embraced by a younger generation apparently unfazed by its excesses, brutalism is enjoying a cultural moment. With The Brutalist, an arthouse hit in current release, and a dawning awareness that the cult of modernism had too long overlooked the idiom altogether, the style’s long eclipse is clearly over.

To some of us here in good old Boston, the home of much distinguished (and too often maligned) modern architecture, this is good news indeed. Why, just last month, our city hall (Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles, 1968), a perennial feature on many an online list of the country’s ugliest buildings, was designated an official historical landmark on January 24.

For a building that many Bostonians (and others) have loved to hate, this is a remarkable reversal of aesthetic fortune. (Not so many years ago, a popular former mayor who was otherwise a friend of preservation proposed selling it off; many more advocated its demolition.) To someone who has admired the building since boyhood, and later spent more than 20 years working within its redoubtable concrete walls, this development feels like a vindication.

Rather like an unloved child, Boston City Hall has long been a difficult building to understand, much less appreciate. People persistently favor the pretty over the bold, and the few monumental structures that excite public affection tend to be dams and bridges rather than municipal buildings. Nevertheless, City Hall was one of the very first works of modern architecture to stir my young imagination.

Visiting Boston for the first time in the summer of 1966, I was fascinated to see it under construction. No abstract, barely three-dimensional box was this! Here was a building unmistakably modern but rich in detail, dense with shadow! There seemed to be an implicit narrative in its projecting and reeding masses, something expressive of the workings of a great city.

My eight-year-old self had previously assumed that all these qualities had died with Queen Victoria but of course, the building had never been intended as a repudiation of architectural history. Years later, I came to see (and relish the irony) that the exterior of this modern monument could be read as a colossally scaled classical entablature, much as its interior courtyard echoes the cortile of an Italian Renaissance palazzo.

Heroism cannot be achieved by half measures, however, and as we know, the grandeur of the original plan was undermined by the fecklessness of its execution. Value engineering compromised the originally planned interior finishes. A more serious failing was the inflexibility of the concrete structure itself, which struggled to absorb the HVAC and telecommunications infrastructure essential to present-day office use. As a consequence, cables and conduits cluttered many interior surfaces, spoiling the effect of the coffered ceilings and promoting a general air of neglect.

Compounding these faults, entirely valid post-9/11 security measures resulted in all manner of herding stanchions and detection devices cluttering the lobbies in haphazard fashion. Nor were the equally important interventions to promote accessibility executed with any greater care. Lighting was dreadful: hot spots alternating with dark caverns more suited to a Hallowe’en haunted house than an important public building. Way-finding signage, where it existed at all, was inadequate if not actively confusing. And outside the front door, City Hall Plaza was quite simply a civic embarrassment: a vast, windswept expanse of brick pavers, largely unrelieved by trees or lighting fixtures, wholly devoid of visual comfort or interest.

Thankfully, however, recent years (and a more aesthetically enlightened mayoral administration) have been far kinder to the building. While the main lobby’s soaring volume has been retained, the space has been invitingly redesigned, integrating security and accessibility features that had too long been afterthoughts. And although still too few (that inflexible concrete grid again!), the elevators have been improved in both function and finish. Lighting and way-finding signage throughout the building are at long last adequate, attractive, and above all, consistent.

These improvements, each less sweeping in their individual scope than in their aggregate effect, demonstrate what can result when citizens decide to love (and sensitively adapt for present needs) an ambitious building from another era. (Somewhat earlier, the notoriously austere Philip Johnson addition to the Boston Public Library [1972] in Copley Square had been similarly humanized by William Rawn & Associates.)

I’m old enough to remember that too few communities bothered to pursue this approach in post-war America, when countless worthy nineteenth-century buildings, both public and private, were razed, often for nothing more than surface parking lots. I know Boston City Hall (and Government Center generally) stand on the site of Scollay Square, and I do not excuse the latter’s destruction (much less that of the nearby West End). But one need not be an apologist for the sins of urban renewal in order to appreciate some of its products. And surely it is heartening to see the old pattern of public indifference — if not antagonism — toward the built residue of the recent past lose its force.

Oh, and the plaza out front is now (apart from the too-tall Government Center T station headhouse) much as it ought to have been all along. As redesigned by Sasaki in 2022, gone are both the boundless sea of heaving brick pavers and the well-intentioned but irrelevant arcade added along its Cambridge Street edge in the early 2000s. In their place are well-lighted hardscape areas for seating and gathering, and appropriately chosen and (for the present, at least) well maintained plant materials.

It is axiomatic that the abstractions of modernism and its variants do not lend themselves to patina, which is the tribute that time (it is said) pays to beauty. The softening of outlines, the mellowing of surfaces that so often enhance buildings of more traditional idiom tend to make works of modern architecture look merely shabby and forlorn. Thus, the present administration’s significant reinvestment in the building allows us all to appreciate it as if for the first time. To my eye, the promise that excited my youthful admiration that summer day long ago has been abundantly fulfilled. What had long been an object of public ambivalence, if not scorn, has become a source of civic pride.

Almost sixty years on, Boston City Hall has never looked so good. Anyone who hasn’t been there recently should find an excuse to visit. Why not save the cost of a postage stamp — or online transaction fee — and pay that parking ticket in person? A pleasant surprise awaits, for the building is welcoming as never before, within and without. You could grab a caffe macchiato from the coffee bar in the lobby. Who knows, you might run into an old friend — or make a new one. And after you’ve exchanged your impressions of the building’s merits, the two of you can duck out to catch a screening of The Brutalist…