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Boston City Hall: Conception and Reception

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Boston City Hall: Conception and Reception ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Boston City Hall: Conception and Reception in the Era of Civil Defense ! ! Angie! Jo HAA 98br: Advanced Tutorial: Methods of Architectural History December! 15, 2014 Instructor: David Sadighian !1 Boston City Hall: Conception and Reception in the Era of Civil Defense ! . there is no such thing as a merely given, or simply available, starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them. The idea of beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning. ! - Edward Said, Orientalism Introduction Boston City Hall has been equally described as beautiful and monstrous, a fortress, a bunker, intimidating, dignified, a waste of space, and the greatest use of space, in a passionate and polarizing struggle of reception from its design in 1962, to its current state in 2014. Its conception is often attributed to human actors—the architects Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles and the competition jury that chose their design—and the intentions of character and resolve, articulated governance, and openness to civic life that they proposed on paper long before any building went up. These intentions have nearly always been described as abstract ideals removed from any particular political situation that may necessitate such “character and resolve.” There was not a word mentioned, either in the commission or in the architects’ statements, of the political nature of the civic project, nor the national and international tensions of the time—non-human actors that inevitably had a hand in the making of Boston City Hall, but have rarely been addressed. As a means of probing into this territory, reception theory proposes considering the building based on what it became in the real experiences of users, not on what it was ostensibly intended to be in the story put forth by the architects.1 The story of Boston City ! —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 1. David Monteyne, "Boston City Hall and a History of Reception,” Journal of Architectural Education 65, no. 1 (2011): 47, accessed December 5, 2014, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1531-314X.2011.01171.x/abstract. !2 Hall’s reception under this light points at an unspoken, but clearly perceived connection of influence from, and acquiescence to, the national Cold War civil defense campaign to create “fallout protection for every citizen” undertaken by the Kennedy administration in the 1960s.2 This movement led to the state’s explicit cooperation with the American Institute of Architects, as well as with 88% of building owners across the country by 1969, to both adapt pre-existing buildings and design new ones for the purpose of providing (at best, and merely symbolizing, at worst) shelter against Soviet nuclear attack.3 This militarization particularly targeted civic architecture. Through competitions and commissions, it encouraged a “bunker” aesthetic that assumed an implicit enemy, anticipated destruction, and created monumental bastions of concrete as shows of state force and protection from an extremely clear Other. Though it may seem unintuitive to apply Edward Said’s Orientalism to a reading of an American city hall built for an American city, it is undeniable that the mid-century American experience was “an era of extraordinary turbulence in the relations of East and West. No one will have failed to note how “East” has always signified danger and threat during this period, even as it has meant the traditional Orient as well as Russia.” 4 If this parallel of the USSR as the Other holds, it is incredible that such “bunker” buildings as Boston City Hall were designed and constructed without one word of their inherent political motivation from their supposed creators. I propose a close analysis of the Boston City Hall that was built, rather than the one that was designed and proposed. The reason behind its hostile reception from many Bostonians may be traced back to its tacit formal connection to a campaign of aggressive civil defense, and ! —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 2. David Monteyne, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 36. 3. Ibid., 54 4. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, Inc., 1978), 26 !3 the time-specific symbolism of war encoded in its form—all in contrast to the abstract, unpoliticized, intellectually “pure” representations and rhetoric of the original architects. As Said wrote, “Too often literature and culture [are] presumed to be politically, even historically innocent.” 5 So too is architecture. But as sheer creation of humans, architecture is too often complicit—consciously or unconsciously—in human striving to dominate, control, and defeat what they mistrust and do not understand—the Other. There is no purely abstract beginning, no matter what architects may intend. This essay is a foray into the more ominous forces of Boston City Hall’s birth that also moved the architect’s hand. ! Commission & Intention The architectural language aims at an iconic building to convey the dignity and openness of contemporary government. 6 ! - KMW Architecture We distrust and have reacted against an architecture that is absolute, uninvolved and abstract. We have moved towards an architecture that is specific and concrete, involving itself with the social and geographic context, the program, and methods of construction, in order to produce a building that exists strongly and irrevocably, rather than an uncommitted abstract structure that could be any place and, therefore, like modern man—without identity or presence. - Gerhard Kallmann, 1966 7 ! The language of Kallmann and his firm o"er a building with two traits: 1. openly articulating governance; and 2. committed, un-abstract, and grounded to its context. The first trait is primarily expressed in a perspectival section drawing of the interior, presented as part ! —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 5. Ibid., 27 6. Kallmann McKinnell & Wood Architects, “Boston City Hall: Project Description,” KMW Architecture, accessed December 10, 2014 http://www.kmwarch.com/project.aspx?cat=6&id=1 7. Gerhard Kallmann, interview by Paul Heyer, Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America (New York: Walker, 1978), 260. !4 of the original competition entry [Fig. 1]. The tripartite logic of the program begins with an open-circulation ground floor, constituting the lobby and service centres for visitors. The idea was that most visitor services would be located on this floor, which would thus be most accessible to the public. The second tier would contain a mosaic of the largest and most important ceremonial rooms, such as the council chamber and the mayor’s o#ce. In the section drawing, the council chamber’s tapered, reverse-ziggurat geometry is shown thickly screwing downward into the ceiling of the ground floor, presumably showing the “open articulation” of this significant space in the form of the surrounding mass. The third tier, despite its negligible presence in the drawing, is the bureaucratic attic of the building, with rings of o#ce space around a central atrium—of no presumed interest to the visitor, and therefore visually spare in the representation. The geometric articulation of ceremonial space that is visible in section view suggests the architects’ belief that the seat of government should expose the spaces in which governance occurs, rather than embedding them inside incommunicable, unarticulated mass of material. However earnest this intention, the reality seems to be that the massing weight of the material, when built, came to dominate the wish for transparency and exterior expression of the interior. The clear articulation of these spaces would never be seen from any vantage point that a user might possibly take inside or outside the building—rendering this attempt at transparent governance incomprehensible outside its representation. Lay critics also pointed out that the new council chambers—the literal stage of open, public forum—were smaller, had lower ceilings, and were less accessible to visitors than the 19th-century chambers of the old city hall [Fig. 3].8 The openness of the building to its plaza has also been drastically cut down ! —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 8. David Monteyne, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 239. !5 in recent years: The permanent barring of the north and south entrances to “simplify security measures,” 9 and the rigorous set of security screens behind the main entrance speak to a programmatic turning inward of the building, orthogonal to its original intent of open accessibility. The section drawing also misrepresents the degree of vertical accessibility the interior allows: for example, each of the four original entrances opened out on a di"erent level, adding to the confusion. The elevator cores also di"ered in their access to di"erent floors, because some of the building’s volumes were subtracted out in ways that required specific pathways to reach. For example, the fourth floor cannot be accessed from the south- side elevator, because it is an isolated volume enclosed in the northeastern corner of the
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