A Tough Stance

At 50 years old, Boston City Hall is one of the most polarizing buildings in America. Building upgrades and revitalization plans hope to change that, but they mistake what the architecture stood for.

- Samuel Medina

We may quarrel about the purported baleful effect of concrete when applied in mass quantities, but we can certainly agree that it should not be attempted in edible form. At a press event one morning this past February, Boston mayor Martin J. Walsh sliced into Boston City Hall, reproduced in cake and unappetizing gray frosting on the occasion of the building’s 50th anniversary.

Wearing an expression of acute concentration, the mayor served up a slice and handed it to a gracious elderly man at his side—the building’s architect Michael McKinnell. Moments before, McKinnell had praised Walsh’s commitment to steward City Hall into the new century, even if that means reconfiguring its original interiors and ripping up the seven-acre brick plaza outside. Both the lobby and city council chamber were recently renovated— updated with digital signage, LED lighting, and in the lobby, new security turnstiles—and are now ADA-compliant. A programmatic reorganization of the workspaces is forthcoming. By far the largest intervention, a $60 million plan to correct the “undifferentiated void” of the plaza, is slated for completion in 2022; in the latest available design, there are necessary innovations (storm- water management) and nonentities bearing pompous names (a “speaker’s corner” amid clusters of trees). These projects garnered support from Walsh, who, ironically, had once called for the building’s demolition. “All civic buildings need a patron, and we have found ours,” McKinnell said.

That may be true. But a civic building also needs a public (indeed many), and in the case of Boston City Hall, one has not been forthcoming. This, at least, has been the standard script: The People don’t like City Hall, and it doesn’t like them.