! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 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