Boston’s Unlikely Heroes
giving voice to the concrete buildings that everyone hates
I have a lot of problems with Boston. I moved up here for school in 2014, trekking all the way from Virginia. I was used to Southern sunlight and warmth, unnecessary smiles, and conversation with strangers. But in Boston, I quickly realized, these things were pretty hard to come by. With its Masshole drivers, bitingly cold and seemingly unending winters, inadequate public transportation, and a level of segregation quantified among the highest in the nation, this city, to me, will always be too old, too small, too cultureless, too cold, too gray and yet still too white.
In perfect compliment to this character is the preponderance of poorly ventilated, fortress-like concrete buildings that dot its cityscape. Daunting and dystopian, ugly artifacts of the Brutalist movement — to which Boston was at one time the most prolific contributor — can be found all over the city. One might expect a rich architectural history, signified by the work of some of the most famous men in their field, to be a source of local pride, but that is not the case with Boston. Almost everyone complains — they’re eyesores, monstrosities that should be torn down and replaced with the sleeker, shinier minimalist buildings we associate with a modern city. Look at Madison Park High School, the Charlestown Branch of the Boston Public Library, the Green Center, and even Boston Architectural College (all below). Each plays to the city’s unfortunate type: cold and grey, like the starless Boston sky and the unfriendly Boston people.
It is a certain kind of tragedy to feel alienated by the architecture of the city you call home. It’s almost like you’re living in a place that was designed to ice you out. There is a narrative in architecture that buildings should be democratic, and reflect the desires and needs and culture of the assortment of people they exist to serve. We should feel empowered to shape and change our landscape. When we aren’t empowered, we need heroes.
I had this thought sitting in the main atrium of Boston City Hall on the Ides of March. WBUR hosted a conversation between Christopher Lydon, veteran radio host and lifelong Bostonian, and the three architects behind Heroic, a book and project that reexamines how we look at (and what we call) brutalist architecture. Chris Grimley, Michael Kubo, and Mark Pasnik (of the firm over,under and the Pinkcomma gallery in Boston’s South End) started Heroic in defense of some of the city’s most iconic buildings, including City Hall in Government Center and more than 20 other buildings, mementos of a building craze in 1950s and 1960s that gave Boston its unique density of concrete.
Michael Kubo: How did this movement come to land in Boston at this time? Boston was a city in transformation. It’s hard for some people to remember that Boston had really stagnated in terms of its built environment since the 1930s. There had been almost no significant new construction. The population had been declining since the 1930s. It was prohibitively expensive to build here. There were various factors that caused the elite financial Brahmin class to leave the city progressively in white flight to the suburbs, especially after WWII. It became a city that needed transformation. This became the mode of transformation.
I was at the event as intern for Chris Lydon’s show Open Source and a budding urban enthusiast with a year’s worth of introductory architecture coursework under my belt. I had skimmed the book, attended a few design school talks on concrete architecture, and written a paper or two on some of the architects mentioned. I had enough experience to gather that half of what architects do is mansplain and defend the grand ideas behind their projects, and was fully prepared for an hour-and-a-half history lesson culminating in the thesis: “It’s not ugly; you just don’t get it.”
I quickly realized, however, that these architects weren’t interested in outright hagiography. In fact, Michael Kubo began by explaining that their choice of the loaded word “heroic” is rooted in both its positive and negative connotations: capturing architecture in balance between valor and hubris. It works more deliberately than “brutalism,” a name that to its proponents signified the civic-minded rawness and honesty of their movement (brut is French for “raw”) yet came to suggest “brutish” or “brutal” to almost everyone else.
Michael Kubo: The term brutalism originally meant this. It really was a call by contemporary architects for a kind of authenticity, a kind of clarity, and a kind of honesty about the social, environmental, and cultural conditions of their time. You would reflect this in the honesty of buildings. You wouldn’t hide the piping, etc.
To brutalists, that honesty was more than a design aesthetic. It was a cultural ideology that they hoped would seep into everyday life, fostering honesty and transparency in people and government. Their aim was to create a built environment that would reflect and promote this ideal throughout their community.
City Hall, in particular, was designed under this ideology. In 1962 there was an international competition to recreate the center of Boston civic life, and of the 256 mostly concrete design submissions, the winner by the professor/grad-student duo of Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell was chosen for the way it asserted architecture’s duty to serve the public realm. It was colossal and stately, so as to reflect its significance, yet at the same time raw and honest, in homage to its namesake tradition.
The building used windows and walkways to revelatory effect: exposing to regular people not only the usually-hidden structural elements of its design, but also its actual interior (and thus the daily happenings of public officials). The architects laid out the notorious outdoor plaza as a space for democratic gathering, where fired-up crowds could present themselves before the city council chamber that protrudes above and demand to be recognized.
Chris Grimley: [Michael McKinnell] said something interesting to us which we hadn’t known until this last talk, which was [that] the competition drawings as submitted were the building. Collins did not want to waste the public coffers on redesign or radical alterations or anything else, which is unprecedented.
Mark Pasnik: He even said that it was difficult for [the designers themselves] to make changes. And I think this was partly to symbolize that there was no political interference — nobody was getting anything where suddenly they had to change the design and put in some kind of special tile or something. It was really designed to preserve the vision of the building.
But City Hall is just one of many local gems that the architects defend. From that period up until 1976, the world’s top architects — from Le Corbusier to Walter Gropius to Marcel Breuer to I. M. Pei — were studying in and shaping Boston through their unique concrete works. They designed schools, office buildings, hospitals, art centers, and more, each with that same grandeur and idealism, a treasure trove of testaments to their belief in architecture’s ability to take everyday people and get them to care. It is this valiant intention that has been lost in the discussion surrounding brutalism and in Boston’s architectural legacy as a whole. It’s almost as if this movement, whatever you call it, is our city’s own Julius Caesar: once welcomed, even lauded, for the scale of its ambition, but later condemned for the very same trait.
Mark Pasnik: The perceived narrative in which so many people think about buildings like this — as though they’re ugly or mean-spirited — is actually a dangerous reading. These are some really significant buildings by very talented architects that have been destroyed and instead replaced by things that are quite lightweight, thin, corporate in nature — not at all the kind of civic grandeur that these other buildings were envisioned as.
If that’s so, then the architects of over,under are our Mark Antony, here not simply to praise our fallen Caesar, but to give him a noble burial. This wasn’t a mere defense, because they acknowledged where the movement failed. City Hall, for example, although designed as a space for public gathering, never truly fulfilled its legacy in the way that its creators had hoped. And what’s more, the knee-jerk reaction of many tourists, visitors, and residents of Boston to denounce it as ugly and menacing has led to active neglect of building maintenance by city officials. No matter how much background you provide, you can’t ignore the initial feeling that these buildings induce in many people.
Mark Pasnik: There’s a very famous story of how Mayor Collins reacted when he first saw the building. When the sheet was lifted off, it has been said that he mumbled something under his breath. Later on, McKinnell asked his aide what the mysterious message was. His aide responded by asking “Do you really want to know what he said?” When McKinnell replied “yes,” Collins responded with: “What the fuck is that?”
At the end of the event, when Pasnik polled the audience for their opinions of Government Center, almost half still disliked it. But this is not to say that the project did not succeed. Heroic does not propose the superiority (or even inclusion) of brutalism in the aesthetic canon, but rather calls upon us to recognize the beauty of good intention, architectural optimism, and Boston-bred patriotism visible in these buildings. In retelling an important piece of Boston’s history, this project is an elegy for a meaningful experiment in architecture for the public good. Though the movement has ended, and architecture’s role in our lives has changed, we live today among the relics of a city and nation that put faith in design as expression of our thoughts and ideals.
On this Ides of March, we were invited to look into our hearts and contemplate our relationship with brutalism. It’s both good and bad, but more saliently, it’s over. We live in a Boston that is both changing and changed, and we’ve wrongfully demonized our only remnants of a wave of heroic, democratic architecture. Mark Antony asked the crowd at Caesar’s funeral, “You all did love him once, not without cause: What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?” When Faneuil Hall opened in 1976, ushering in the era of Boston as a “brick city,” brutalism never got its proper burial. Heroic gives that to us. It recovers those large concrete monstrosities as memorials.
To listen to excerpts from the event, click here. To buy the book, click here.
