The Strange Appeal of Brutalist Architecture And The Case Of Boston City Hall

Like @alexbeyman, I've always felt strangely drawn to Brutalism. This is even though I know these buildings require a tremendous amount of maintenance, inspire feelings of psychological unease and discomfort in their users, and decimate the communities where they are built.

It's like I feel drawn to them the way a victim feels attracted to her abuser.

Head over to Alex's post for some thoughts on why we're attracted to these structures. (This post began as a comment on his - then I realized I was getting too long-winded.)

---

Photo by Peter H. Dreyer on Flikr, some rights reserved.

---

Did you see the movie High Rise, based on the book by JG Ballard? Both the book and movie are phenomenal. They capture the love affair we have with this architecture even as it erodes our personalities. In fact, much of Ballard's work as a writer strikes me as a human reaction to the Utopian ideals made manifest in dehumanizing forces of progress enshrined in this architecture. The trailer below is full of fictional brutalist beauty.

I just can't bring myself to hate it. I saw the towers in that movie, watched what happened there, and thought, I wouldn't mind living there, though.

Now, consider what the original Boston City Hall looks like.

Image Source

---

A large building, sure, but it rises organically from the neighborhood, engages with the community with traditional lines, and incorporates landscaping, pattern, and scale to bring a human dimension to an administrative edifice. It was built in the French Second Empire style, and if anything, it looks even more comfortably situated in a densely developed part of the city than it did when it was built in what was a mostly empty space.

Now the city conducts its business from what's been voted the world's ugliest building. It squats over a bleak, sterile brick-scape like an alien facehugger sucking the life from the city.

I'm sure people are working in there, but the place always looks abandoned. And unless the Patriots are holding another victory rally in that plaza, it's always as abandoned as it looks in this picture. The wind whips urban tumbleweeds of debris across that vast space, and people scamper into the Government Center T Station to get underground and away as quickly as possible.

Image Source

---

When we considered opening a business in the city and we had to enter that building, we were perplexed. Just where do you go in, and why would you want to? It looks like it's going to collapse on top of you at any moment. It certainly doesn't make you feel like you want to participate in the civic life of the city you love. It tells the people, you're insignificant. Our bureaucracy will crush you.

See-ming Lee 李思明/Flickr via Creative Commons license.

Still, as an expression of power and permanence and outright will, it's a success. If I worked there, I'd probably feel smug and powerful. And despite the universal loathing this building engenders, it's still being used, 50 years later.

In a way, the persistence of these brutalist buildings is a thumb in the eye of New Urbanism, which in all respects is a kinder, gentler way of managing our landscape and building sustainable communities. But as enthusiastic as I was about New Urbanism a decade or two ago, it feels like all it's really produced since then is more shopping malls. Sure, these shopping centers are turned inside-out and have pretty sidewalks instead of gloomy, under-lit concourses, and sure, they're mixed use with high-priced apartments located above the expensive shops, but in the end these communities have just turned into another way for people to drape their consumerism in the feel-good clothing of social superiority.

New Urbanist communities have become the politically correct shopping centers of the urban landscape, with the same mercenary motives at their heart.

At least when you approach an example of brutalist architecture, you know what you're walking in to.