!!!!!!!!!!!!B o s t o n C i t y H a l l : C o n c e p t i o n a n d R e c e p t i o n

i n t h e E r a o f C i v i l D e f e n s e

!!Angie Jo !

HAA 98br: Advanced Tutorial: Methods of Architectural History December 15, 2014 !

Instructor: David Sadighian

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B o s t o n C i t y H a l l : C o n c e p t i o n a n d R e c e p t i o n

i n t h e E r a o f C i v i l D e f e n s e

!. . . 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 !

I n t r o d u c t i o n

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.

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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

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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.

!C o m m i s s i o n & I n t e n t i o n

The architectural language aims at an iconic building to convey the dignity and openness of contemporary government. - KMW Architecture 6 !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 offer 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.

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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 office. 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 office 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.

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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 different

level, adding to the confusion. The elevator cores also differed in their access to different

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

building.10 To mitigate visitor confusion inside this labyrinthian space, employees have gone

so far as to post “handwritten signage.” 11 Even without entering the building for business, the

language of openness in the drawing is generally misleading of the hall’s overall form—blank

spaces replace the heavy massing of concrete louvers, leaving them white and empty, and the

entire structure is depicted as floating in some abstract space without reference to the ground

or the surrounding setting. This depiction of Boston City Hall’s interior as just one square cut

out of a potentially infinite system of such louvres and beams only adds to its anti-urban

reputation. Though, of course, this is only one of the many competition drawings produced by

the architects [Fig. 2], it is still clear that the geometrical clarity, theoretical legibility, and

openness of this representation conflicts deeply with the lived experience of real users.

!

!—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 9. Ibid., 238 10. Ibid., 239 11. Ibid.

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The second trait—that of concrete grounding—is pronounced with equal conviction in

written form: “We distrust and have reacted against an architecture that is absolute,

uninvolved and abstract.” At the same time, despite the stated distaste for uninvolvement, the

specific ways in which the building would concretely, strongly, and irrevocably “involve itself

with the social and geographic context” is left on the level of abstraction. This statement

implies that the architect knows something of the social and geographical conditions in which

he exists, and that somehow, these conditions necessitate such forceful traits in the building he

will make. However, in neither this mission statement nor in the original 1962 competition

guidelines is there any mention of a specific political necessity for a building of this form—in

fact, the only non-technical mandate in the latter says to “reflect the highest aspirations of the

people served” and to “fulfill the future’s needs in a way that does honour to the past”12—

vague sentiments with little hope into real translation, as the design, selection, and

commission of architecture is never a democratic process, and the future and the past can be

interpreted at will without any representation from the majority of users.

Michael McKinnell himself frankly admitted that at the time, he had been “totally

consumed with formal and spatial issues… I wasn’t really interested in what the users of the

building might think or want.” 13 Not only does this signal that the architects consciously

ignored the social, geographical, and political concerns of the people of 1960s Boston, but also

that they made Said’s critical “pure vs. political” error:14 that of believing themselves capable

!—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 12. Lawrence Anderson, “A Competition to Select an Architect for the New City Hall in the Government Center of the City of Boston,” competition brief (Boston: Government Center Commission, 1961), 15. 13. Michael McKinnell, interview by David Dillon, The Architecture of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood (New York: Edizioni Press, 2004), 6. 14. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, Inc., 1978), 9

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of distinguishing pure—“spatial and formal” architectural ideas—from political knowledge—

the desires and thoughts of human actors. Whether or not the architects were conscious of it,

they would never have been capable of operating in a purely abstract spatial and formal mode.

The social and geopolitical issues of the time would, according to Said, have inevitably

infiltrated the work of any human actor—whether from conscientious consideration of user

input, or from implicit pressure and incentives from culture and state campaigns.

!R e c e p t i o n

The architects’ abstract intentions, “pure of politics,” were largely taken at face value by

many architectural professionals and critics. Most importantly, the building’s placement

within the context of architecture’s theoretical and historical lineage were assumed by all. If

one considered Boston City Hall in its architectural lineage as traced by architectural

intellectuals, a very particular reading would emerge: In contrast to the transparent,

minimalist, glass-box modernism that had spread internationally in the 1950s as the

prototypical image of public building—yes, Boston City Hall, with its massive, monumental

materiality could perhaps be read as existing more “strongly and irrevocably.” In criticism of

the universal applicability and theoretical abstraction of “Esperanza” architecture, whose lack

of anchor to any specific place or culture could have been interpreted as an echo of the pangs

of modern man, “without identity or presence”—yes, Boston City Hall could perhaps be read

as “involving itself with the social and geographic context” by contrast. This was certainly the

kind of background education that architectural greats such as Walter Gropius and Ada Louise

Huxtable held in the back of their minds when they lauded the building for its “human

!——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

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scale,”15 and its “dignity, humanism, and power,”16 respectively. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s 1969

review, for instance, praised the hall as “a frank homage to the constructivist heritage from

Rietveldt to Le Corbusier and Kahn,” while requiring a “user who is willing to understand its

intentions and solutions”—that is, the intentions and solutions posited by the designers, and

positioned within the discipline’s traditions—for “city people are unschooled in environmental

observation.” 17 This method of privileging the reception of the architectural elite, while

ignoring the “unschooled” opinions and experiences of the public at large, has ignored the

looming fact that Kallmann’s statement about the “commitment,” “strength,” and “specificity”

of the design only makes sense with the assumption of shared, esoteric knowledge. A framework

that includes this knowledge is able to dictate discussions of Boston City Hall as merely a

divisive subject of “correct” appreciation or “misinterpretation.” However, without this

specialized expertise in architectural heritage, what exactly is Boston City Hall committed and

specific to? Against what is it strong and irrevocable?

The vast majority of documented evidence from Bostonian lay critics and users reveals

a reoccurring and deep unease towards these questions. It is an unease that does not merely

stem from the building’s inaccessibility flaws as a “product of the usage rather than the

design,” as journalist Gary Wolf rightfully pointed out—given the changes in maintenance that

were obviously beyond the architects’ control, such as the closing of half the original

entrances, and additional security measures that have been installed in recent years.18 From a

!—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 15. Anthony Yudis, “Federal Building, City Hall Go Together,” Boston Globe, May 13, 1962, 40. 16. Ada Louise Huxtable, “Boston’s New City Hall,” New York Times, February 4, 1969, 51. 17. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, “Boston’s New City Hall,” The Architectural Forum 130, no. 1 (January-February 1969): 45. 18. Brian Sirman, “Concrete Dreams:  Architecture, Politics, and Boston’s New City Hall” (PhD thesis, Boston University, 2014), 229.

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vox populi survey taken in 1973 by Ellen Perry Berkeley (who spent a week interviewing

passersby, employees, and officials both inside and outside City Hall),19 to demolition

movements, even to current-day Yelp reviews, there is a frequent emergence of descriptors that

are hostile in a particularly political way: overbearing, monstrous, brutal, harsh, prison,

fortress—even “Soviet.” In 2005, ArchitectureBoston quoted an employee who had worked in

the Office of the Mayor from 1988 to 1997, who described the front facade of the building as

“the maw of some devouring beast from which you might never emerge alive.”20 The Boston

Globe, often the arena in which these local disputes took place, reported both of Mayor

Thomas Menino’s attempts within his 20-year mayorship to abandon Boston City Hall for a

new “architecturally magnificent” seat of government, rather than “a massive concrete building

that some have compared to a prison.” 21 At the building’s opening in the 60s, a Bostonian

likened the concrete staircases that rise diagonally across the facades to “Lenin’s Tomb,” 22

referencing the perception of un-American “Otherness” that continues to this day—as of 2014,

the building holds a two-star average rating on Yelp, with users claiming the building’s one

upside is its “reminder to give thanks not to have been born in Soviet Russia.” 23 David

Monteyne, architectural historian and author of Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the

!—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 19.  Ellen Perry Berkeley, ‘‘More Than You May Want to Know about Boston City Hall,’’ Architecture Plus (February 1973), 73.  20. “Inside Story,” ArchitectureBoston 8, no. 3 (May/June 2005): 46.  21. Matt Viser and Donovan Slack, “Mayor Says He’ll Build Waterfront City Hall” Boston Globe, December 13, 2006. 22. ‘‘Lenin’s Tomb’’ found in Blake Ehrlich, ‘‘Man About Boston: Bouquets and Brickbats for that New City Hall,’’ Boston Traveler (4 May 1962). 23. Tom V., ”Boston City Hall,” review on Yelp.com, February 21, 2014,  http://www.yelp.com/biz/boston-city-hall-boston?hrid=4B0BAcrafbA_GV7U8Rud2g.

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Cold War, notes, “Boston City Hall became a node within a Civil War discourse about the

boundaries between American and un-American architecture and activities.” 24

While it is impossible to gain a perfectly representative public reception of Boston City

Hall from the sources above, it is possible to pick up key words that show the nature of many

people’s concerns. The “uneducated” user, as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy warned, may be uneducated

in the intellectual, theoretical, and academic lineage of architecture. However, the average

Bostonian user in the 1960s was likely keenly aware of the politics of the time, and very capable

of articulating the political associations that Boston City Hall came to hold for the public in a

very real, palpable way.

!C i v i l D e f e n s e — S a f e S h e l t e r t o E n e m y B u n k e r ?

It must be made clear that Boston City Hall was not designed with the specific aim to

act as a functional bunker or fallout shelter. There was no evidence to suggest that any form of

building could protect citizens reliably from nuclear attack, and even in the case of radioactive

particles in the aftermath, “none of the subsequent calculations by the fallout shelter analysts

considered how fallout might drift and accumulate through, under, and along the courts and

colonnades in the building’s complex midsection.” 25 That said, the building still took on the

formal aesthetic of the 1960s’ conception of a “bunker,” as defined by Monteyne: “a military

structure designed both to protect its occupants and to command a field of fire… to control

space, both interior and exterior.” 26 With its solid massing, overhanging cliffside faces, and

thin black openings that occluded any view inside, the hall did playact the role well. In

!—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 24. David Monteyne, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 241. 25. Ibid., 256 26. Ibid., Introduction, xix

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addition, while it was not designed to include fallout shelter, it did contain spaces on all floors

(except the very top) that were later identified by civil defense officials as adequate fallout

shelter for exactly 19,293 citizens [Fig. 4].27 Ultimately, Boston City Hall was marked with a

yellow fallout shelter sign, stocked with thousands of boxes of federally provided high-calorie

crackers, sanitation kits, first aid materials, and radiation monitors, and contained offices for

the civil defense department on the fourth floor. 28 This development seems counter-intuitive

to the negative connotations the building seems to hold—why would the protective form and

clear marking of the building as shelter not suggest a positive reading? The citadel of the

citizens, rather than an enemy bunker against them?

Foucault wrote that in the “atomic situation,” “the power to expose a whole population

to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence.” 29 A

model of the society that undertakes this kind of social contract is one in which the state holds

and assures the continued lives of all—but only as long as everyone submits to the government

in power. As a citizen, submitting to the state by using civic architecture—especially in

“atomic” times—comes with the experience of inherent cognitive dissonance that urbanist

Lawrence Vale identified in Architecture, Power, and National Identity: “Reassuring civic

messages and discomforting authoritarian ones engage in a kind of cognitive co-existence.” 30

When approaching any building that represents the state, people become simultaneously

aware of the dependence they have on its power for the continuation of their safety and values,

!—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 27. Ibid., 269 28. Ibid., 255-261 29. Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power Over Life,” The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Random House Inc., 1978), 137. 30. Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 8.

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as well as the ever-present possibility that this power may just as easily be used against them.

In the case of Boston City Hall in the 1960s, the reassurance that the building’s form offered as a

symbol of potential protection was never concretely and exactingly specified as protection

against some other thing, in terms most Bostonians could understand. Just as a guard dog can

only be perceived as a guard from behind the dog, a bunker can only be seen as a refuge in

relation to some external threat. In the absence of a clear and justified Other, the flip side of

this cognitive coin may have carried more weight in the perceptions of the people. Rather than

reassurance, the building’s aesthetic of “strength”—brute strength, committed to an

unspecified thing—may have tipped its image into one of sheer authoritarianism, despite the

helpful disaster relief supplies the building may have held in its basement.

Boston City Hall’s “bunker” form thus may have been perceived not as a safe haven

from a foreign and threatening Other, but as the state’s forceful and authoritarian thrust of an

international war into the home front. Rather than separating the two political ideas at hand

—the war that the American government was currently engaging in, and the idea of the

American government itself, in general and for all times—Boston City Hall became the

amalgamation; war as state, state as war. It furthered the actively political “message directed at

U.S. citizens [that] the Cold War, like all twentieth-century wars, was a total war premised on

total mobilization of the populace,” according to Monteyne. 31 In this state of implied total

war, the Foucauldean “power to expose a whole population to death” was not only the weapon

the state could wield on the Other, but also by definition, the same weapon it could use on the

citizenry of the United States itself. By creating a civic structure that brought the language of

war into the heart of the home country, it seems possible that the architects—whose purpose

!—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 31. David Monteyne, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Introduction, xiv.

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in designing was, after all, not to shield people against physical destruction at the specific time

of the Cold War, but to represent civic ideas—tacitly synonymized the timeless role of the

American government with the time-specific performance of the American government in the

1960s to engage in a war of potential total destruction. In this framework, the form of Boston

City Hall completely threw the public off guard, because they had expected the new city hall of

Boston to be one that captured the permanent essence of their city and the values of their

country—not one that imitated a bunker for the immediate concerns of the time.

Performance theorist Tracy Davis interprets the architecture of the American nuclear

defense movement during the Cold War as “impermanent stage sets for these momentary

dramas.” 32 The crucial question for a civic building—the city hall for Boston, which is the

birth place of the American identity, in many ways—is what happens when the stage set

outlives the drama? What happens to a building that is not scripted to update with the times?

When the political context it was specifically referencing passes, the meaning that is attributed

to it becomes unstable. If its form is scripted to continually act committedly, concretely,

strongly, reassuringly against some Other that is not well-defined, and is not scripted to do

something else when that Other has already passed, the reading of this building might decay

into confusion, hostility, and authoritarianism—against nothing in particular. Vale asks, “How

can a designer defend an exquisite formal gesture if it becomes publicly overshadowed or

undermined by the indefensible acts of the building’s institutional inhabitants or by some

other historical relationship to which that building may stand?” 33

!—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 32. Ibid., Introduction, xvi 33. Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 7.

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One answer to this dilemma may be for designers to recognize that they do not exist in

ivory towers. And if they do recognize this, to then recognize that their own definitions of civic

values and concepts might only derive meaning from within the realms of space, form, and

relation to precedent. And finally, to recognize that, though this sense of meaning may feel

“pure,” it is still being influenced by the politics of the time, whether the designer is conscious

of it or not, willingly partakes in it or not. It is worth noting that while Kallmann McKinnell &

Knowles’s design proposal for Boston City Hall in particular made no mention of the politics

of civil defense, they were designing at the same time the AIA Journal was writing that “the

architects whom history remembers have often been great military engineers as well.” 34 In

fact, by 1961 the debate of whether the AIA’s “unilateral decision on behalf of the members to

assist the government” was actually “planning for destruction” was raging amongst architects

who rose to protest this form of “anti-architecture.” 35 These protesters questioned the ethical

implications of architects’ close collaboration with any government in the atomic situation:

Rather than using their technical expertise to provide shelter to any human in the world who

might need it, the civil defense movement ordered architects to shelter their own “side,” and to

take a nationalist stance in what would otherwise be an international, nationless profession—

to prepare for war and build bunkers. “Civil defense” posited an Other for architects, and

required them to design with destruction, war, and enmity as the anticipated and inevitable

result. Some architects found this extremely motivating and explicitly agreed: Ralph Walker,

AIA president and voted “architect of the century” by his colleagues in 1957, saw the deliberate

need to combat collectivist nations as a threat to creativity, individualism, and “the

!—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 34. David Monteyne, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Introducion, xvii. 35. Ibid., 109

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professional identity of architects as independent providers of unique services to a private

clientele.” 36 MIT dean and professor John Ely Burchard gave a keynote address at the 1951

AIA convention, saying that “the architecture of a united world… would be no architectural at

all if Soviet power dominates.” 37 Frank Lloyd Wright also supported containment, for the “the

ideology and the style meant standardization and diminishment of the soul.” 38 And of course,

as with all technologies that need to create and build in order to exist, there was always the

lurking implication that war could spell profit and progress from a state of tabula rasa.

All of this is to say that architecture was no stranger to the politics of the time—in an

era of rabid anti-Communism and Red scares, the Other was already being pointed out and

feared on the meta level of the professional identity of the architect. Where the architects of

Boston City Hall personally fell in this debate may not be of consequence now, but the fact

that they were human beings who lived and created, influenced and were influenced during

this time of turmoil should always be taken as the grain of salt to the abstraction of their

project statements. Boston City Hall was the product of innumerable unspoken, unseen actors

—from the desires of the architects on a spatial and formal level, the architectural lineage the

form referenced, the civil defense pressures and political climate of the state, to countless

other factors that may never be delineated or known. This is true for all human products of

any time. The discordant reception of the hall, however, may have stemmed from the breaches

between the human actors of the situation. By insisting on drawing meaning from a select

framework of value exclusive to architectural intellectualism, rather than considering the

social, political, and symbolic frameworks the public drew meaning from, the original creators

of the hall destined it for conflict. By implicitly furthering the temporary objectives of the state !—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 36. Ibid., 127 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid.

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in a situation of paranoia and war, and crystallizing those motives in a building meant for

perpetuity, they created a time capsule whose meaning in the future would be unstable.

Ada Louise Huxtable called Boston City Hall “a tough and complex building for a

tough and complex age… It will outlast the last hurrah.” 39 Whether the last hurrah is behind

Boston City Hall or ahead of it—whether its legacy will be demolition, stagnancy, or new

appreciation and understanding—will depend on the story that is told. Given the tough,

complex situation of the building’s birth, the best story to tell is one that is full, inclusive,

critical, and self-aware. For, as Said wrote, “Human agency is subject to investigation and

analysis, which it is the mission of understanding to apprehend, criticize, influence, and judge.

Above all, critical thought does not submit to state power or to commands to join in the ranks

marching against one or another approved enemy.” 40

!!!!!!!

!

!—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— 39. Ada Louise Huxtable, “Boston’s New City Hall,” New York Times, February 4, 1969, 51. 40. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, Inc., 1978), Introduction, xxix

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Figures !

Figure 1 !Boston City Hall: Perspectival section, Council Chamber, and entrance lobby. Kallmann, McKinnell and

Knowles. 1962-1968.

Source: Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

!!!

!

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Figure 2

Boston City Hall: Perspective, exterior view. Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles. 1962-1968.

Source: Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

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Figure 3

“January 13, 1969: The Boston City Council met for the first time in their new chambers. Unhappy that bare wires protruded from walls and ceilings and that their bulky old desks had to be carted over from

the old city hall, the councillors made known their feelings to the Government Center Commission, all of whose members were present with architect Gerhardt Kallman.”

Source: Boston Globe Archive

http://www.bostonglobe.com/specials/insiders/2013/09/18/boston-city-hall/2ooyfxjA18rWmGZtr8DGLN/picture.html?p1=Article_Gallery

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Figure 4

East-west section of Boston City Hall. Emergency Operations Center in dark blue; fallout shelter spaces in light blue. Source: Office of Civil Defense, Boston City Hall/Boston Massachusetts: Buildings with

Fallout Protection, Design Case Study 7 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971).

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

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!Bibliography !

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