Ugliness Writ Large: Boston City Hall and Beyond
According to a survey conducted by the site Buildworld, and published in January of 2023, with data derived from Twitter posts, Boston City Hall secured second place among the United States' ugliest buildings, and fourth among the world's.
The totality of Boston City Hall has so long been trapped within this framework that, today, to ask people what they think of the building — without even couching it in the query, "Do you think City Hall is ugly?" — feels like a leading question. It is surely by way of comment on its world-famous ugliness that the city's bus tours introduce it. Most discussions (and surveys, and polls) tend to proceed and end along these parameters — and our minds shrink a little more.
In a general sense, Boston City Hall has been dragged by detractors for lacking the prim, recognizable niceties of, for example, the Georgian façades around Harvard Square; or because it is seen as, in a word, inhumane. In their article, “Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture”, Adrian Rennix and Nathan Robinson attack City Hall for its “mind-bogglingly inscrutable shape”, and in doing so stake their premise on the belief that architecture must be resolvable or democratically tasteful. Occasional proposals for solutions to the structures Rennix and Robinson demean, such as a 2009 redesign of City Hall by Aaron Helfland, tend to run along an unsurprising perennial course, and insist upon, or tend to take for granted, the notion that all “humane” architecture has fixed, and eminently intelligible, elements.
These proposals, equally unsurprisingly, tend to invoke ferocious counters comparable to architect Bruce Goodwin’s claim, in Architecture + Urbanism, that the “...vitality of art is possible only in confrontation and opposition to middle class values.” The value of civic architecture, in other words, correlates to its power as a sort of agitating political form against bourgeois sentimentality. This is a viewpoint just as limited as those it intends to combat. Such a confrontation and opposition would be bound to the ephemerality of circumstance and activism; and the reduction of art to the merely political deprives it of all its more mysterious qualities — what Nietzsche referred to as "[an] atmosphere of inexhaustible meaningfulness."
Of course, a range of more complex comprehensions are being excluded here. But that is precisely one of my points: that these discourses warp our critical dialogues into a mimetic merry-go-round of stock keywords and phrases, narrowing the possibilities for understanding, obscuring history, and feeding prejudicial fantasies.
Writing for the Boston Globe in 2013, Paul McMorrow asserted that "[City Hall's] great crime isn't being ugly; it's being anti-urban. The building and its plaza keep a crowded city at arm's length." Yet, as authors Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, and Chris Grimley explained during a talk with Christopher Lydon for their book, Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston, City Hall's design was intended to encourage civic engagement by having the proverbial eyes of the governing body directed at the plaza, wherein it was imagined citizens would amply assemble and demonstrate.
If anything, then, City Hall's architects may have been too hopeful about its pro-urbanity. This is hardly the picture detractors might like to imagine of out-of-touch architects foisting a grim emperor's-new-clothes of a building onto a despised public.
On the merry-go-round, we might also forget that Boston City Hall was something of the Leeds Town Hall of its time, with an international influence, from Romania to Istanbul. People are certainly free to interpret this as proof of some moderne cabal; but it is evidence that, at the very least, City Hall's architectonics were seen as remarkable by numerous clients and architects itching for a new expressive avenue. It turns out that few major buildings of the latter 20th century have enjoyed so much imitation.
This brings up the question: if Boston City Hall is so terrible, why do these imitators — presumably lesser-thans of a world-record gaffe, and so, also presumably, much worse — escape fiercer critical comment? The answer could be, partly, that City Hall represents a monolithic scapegoat for certain uninformed, yet highly opinionated, Americans — perhaps those who, as architectural historian Dell Upton writes in Architecture in the United States, "...could not name a building by Frank Lloyd Wright or pick the man out of a police line-up [but] are certain that he was a great artist."
Curiously, and often, descriptive condemnations one finds of ugly buildings fail to carry any intrinsic negative or positive weight. That a building can be broadly associated with another thing is taken to be damnation enough. This burdens us with an unhelpful vagueness. Worse, it twists the capacity for analogy per se into a categorical evil. "Boston city hall looks like something from Astroid [sic] the Atari game," one Twitter user opines. Another: "Boston City Hall looks like an RCA product you would disassemble to see how it works." McMorrow himself referred to the building's "upside-down wedding-cake columns." But if the worst thing about City Hall is that, as a number of Twitter posts claim, it looks like a "fortress", then why is it not equally inappropriate that the United States Capitol looks like a "church" — that is, St. Paul's cathedral in London? Naysayers may say that the difference is that the former is ugly and the latter is not. This, however, just begs the question.
Among these problematics, what I come back to with the most energy, regarding Boston City Hall's designation as ugly, is how often we overlook the fact that ugliness is not one thing: that it is dynamic, with a variety of appearances, purposes, and effects. The ugliness of a Philip Guston painting is not the same as that of a Cecily Brown painting; nor, to contrast two kinds of media, is the ugliness of Carl Ruggles' Men and Mountains comparable, at all, to that of Paul McCarthy's Bossy Burger. And, just as it would be idiotic for any thinking critic to dismiss David Lynch's Eraserhead on the basis of "ugliness", it is similarly idiotic for proud brutalist nuts to retort on Twitter that City Hall is in fact beautiful, as if lazily appropriating the antonym of their opponents-in-taste does anything but confuse definitions.
City Hall is, indeed, some type of ugly. Architect Noel Michael McKinnell stated, in a 2009 interview, that Philip Johnson's congratulatory description of the building as such "...was the greatest praise we could get." McKinnell’s reminiscence here reorients us further: City Hall was not a provocation against an unfeeling vulgus but against professional and élite preferences — preferences ready to regard the building’s sculptural indulgences as ridiculous and all of its sudden transitions as inelegant. With this as a consideration, we might rather see Boston City Hall as an instigating upstart, determined to confound stiffer-necked adults through that willful, contrarian exuberance which tends to be lost after a maturing of the youthful mind.
And yet its ugliness is utterly unlike the ugliness of your local 7-11, or Harvard's newer Science and Engineering Complex, or the Planned Parenthood on Commonwealth Avenue. In certain cases, ugliness may be a matter of degrees; but in countless other cases it is a matter of type. Although Boston City Hall is a bit too serious and mechanical of a design to be properly grotesque, “grotesque” may come the closest to describing it, in a sort of etymologically elementary way. After all, various places around and within it recall the old, deep ambience of grottoes and caverns. If, however, by grotesque we mean some sort of distortion, we could point to the building's upper exterior which resembles three enormous fasciae lined with giant sluiced dentils; or the spots where it seems as if massive staircases have been inverted and stuck to ceilings; or the hooded twin windows looming over the entrance which seem blown out of scale when compared to the rest of the fenestration.
No doubt, one reason for the focus on City Hall is its size. The most despised buildings tend to be larger. Ugliness writ large, obviously, takes up more space. Depending on the type of ugliness, we might then resent it all the more. City Hall, moreover, may appear (at first) to refer only to itself. This is distinctly different from the "offensiveness" of a gigantic, representational Claes Oldenburg sculpture. More than that, its blocky, asymmetrical excrescences evoke the exquisite corpse game — and, more disruptively, what Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing, in their book Horror in Architecture, call "the death of the unified building." This is most brutally expressed by the building's little-photographed side along Congress Street, where great masses of corbeled bricks abruptly slide into the main structure with the sort of broad geometries one finds in earlier 3D videogames like Quake.
It is no exaggeration to say that much of Boston, and the modern urban American landscape, is quite ugly. Here again we must specify. The Enterprise Rent-A-Car location on River Street in Cambridge, or the School is Cool Academy on Beacon Street in Brookline, typify a common sort of ugliness to which most of us have inured ourselves. It is an ugliness of the mundane — the failure of architecture as commodity rather than as provision: buildings reduced to numb, dumb shacks and stacks with obligatory fenestration, subliminally impressing on us the sense that our lives are little but consumerist transactions between places of insignificance. Of course, Boston City Hall is its own sort of failure; but its failure is, barring some issues of lighting and insulation, one of general reception — not of imagination or aspiration.
When architect Frank Gehry’s house in Santa Monica, California was completed in late 1978, to the design of Gehry himself, it unavoidably aroused passionate and conflicting commentary. As editor Tod A. Marder writes, in The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture:
A month after its local debut in print, the Gehry House was discussed again in the Evening Outlook (Santa Monica) where again the general impressions of the public remained negative. One neighbor called the house an “eyesore” that was out of character with its surroundings and refused to see the interior. A more curious neighbor hoped to tour the inside but remained skeptical of Gehry’s rumored intention to have the house look unfinished: “I hardly think that’s fair,” she said. “If it would ever look completed, I might get used to it.”
The commonality of these criticisms was not just their external focus — as visual criticisms very understandably tend to be, given that the majority of our architectural experiences are external (Marder notes that “…among those who liked the building, all had been treated to a tour of it”) — but their charge, implicit or explicit, of ugliness. The critics’ diverse appraisals equally typified an extant rift within the sociocultural positioning of ugliness: while John Dreyfuss contrarily and enthusiastically described Gehry’s house as one of “highly sophisticated beauty”, Steven Harris bypassed the matter of ugliness altogether and more abstrusely took the house to task for failing to “transcend the mundane through specific references to architectural elements.”
Although Gehry’s own justifications for his materials of choice, including chain-link fences, have been inconsistent, one such justification similarly typifies the situating of ugliness within our modernity: that such selections were made “to show that it is important to use readily available materials and to suggest that you can make beauty out of it, just like Rauschenberg does in his art.” On one level, Gehry’s intentionality for ugliness was for its reception to be transformed through context, much like how an object’s relocation to the museum or art gallery asks for contemplation merely because of situation. On another level, Gehry propagated the undiscriminating logic of Andy Warhol by affirming the mundane as the most “real” or “honest” thing, because the most apparently numerous, accessible, and visible.
Why I bring Frank Gehry’s house into the picture is not just to demonstrate a separate instance of how a structure with no intent to please, according to some more established modality of architectural etiquette, was, in certain cases, appraised similarly to Boston City Hall, but also how the question of ugliness very obviously intersects with aspects of class and domains of specialized knowledge. Is it not possible that the affirmation of ugliness or its positioning as an outdated term is a form of intellectual class warfare — refer again to Bruce Goodwin’s claim, for example — detailing, really, only the advantages of people bound to a world of abstractions?
While the professionals and connoisseurs argue over typologies and how this or that corner is treated, opposed laypeople are left with the fact of each disturbance, and are told that their objections are the death-gasps of old-hat thinking. Simultaneously, a figurehead like Jeff Koons grifts an art world perversely eager to be grifted by reproducing, and then selling for millions, the despised kitsch objects of the lower and middle classes. One can find a state of affairs resembling those of Gehry’s house with the so-called Indeterminate Facade showroom, commissioned by the now-defunct Best Products in 1974. “I might not know much about art,” one can hear a naysaying representative opine, “but I know nonsense when I see it.”
Set against this, Dreyfuss’ description carries with it the same sort of in-the-know self-satisfaction of the aforementioned brutalist nuts. There is an undeniable power in not only accepting but enjoying what others think is ugly; or, in claiming that, between the two, beauty represents that which is outmoded. A 2016 interview with architect Peter Eisenman is emblematic of this point of view, wherein Eisenman (like Umberto Eco) asserts, “Beauty does not disrupt anything. If you see something beautiful, you don’t pay enough attention to it. Beauty, because of its very nature, does not demand close attention.” Unless it can be tempered with some complicating attribute, “beautiful” remains perhaps the weakest positive term one could use to praise an artwork within the typical MFA program — a sign that one has yet to yield to the correct jargon.
In other areas today, we see how the very ideas of beauty and ugliness have been made out to be so problematic, because each tends to adhere to and reinforce culturally normative values, as to be fundamentally toxic. By its own strange way, the so-called body positive movement seems just as excluding of aspiration, and as in denial as to the legitimate reality of ugliness, as Warhol was. Good-looking people are faintly praise-damned as “conventionally attractive”, and any sort of impulse one way or the other is diagnosed as an unthinking reflex of cultural conditioning. Here, too, we see evidence of the pleasure taken in the assertion of deviant values.
It is difficult to justify the positive function of ugliness. Most often, it is invoked as a reminder of what things ought not to be, or as a feature emphasizing evil. Beauty, quite differently, is self-evidently valuable and compelling. Alberto Pérez-Gómez writes, in his book Built upon Love, “Beauty incites the act of replication; it brings copies of itself into being.” People will hurt themselves, even die, for beauty. Whole trajectories of human civilization have been partially guided by the desirability of certain plants, fabrics, building materials, animals, and so on. In these respects, beauty does have aspects of tyranny. As such, the argument for ugliness could represent a Promethean attempt to overthrow a phenomenological powerhouse. Yet beauty, for all of its strangleholds, can be maddeningly ephemeral too, requiring maintenance and discipline if it is to not more quickly disintegrate.
I find myself somewhere in between the points of view these apparent polarities — what we might term conventionality and the avant-garde — represent. Eisenman’s statement is revealed as patently absurd by the history of billions of men who have engaged, pursued, and tended to women throughout history because of their beauty. If beauty did not demand close attention, we would not use “captivating” as a synonym for it. Eisenman (and those who think like him) seems to have made his own categorical error by equating beauty with a sort of tolerable prettiness — that which defines the galant style of music, or the “neutral” residential interior of today, licked by a receding array of off-whites. At the same time, conventionality’s inclination towards the delimiting of creative and experiential range is a truism so banal as to be hardly worth reciting. The trick here is not which of the two should win out, but of how these polarities can co-exist, and, by doing so, keep each other’s dominating impulses in check. A world of music in no other time signatures besides 4/4 would be just as horrible as one with nothing but a super-legion of Virgil Donatis.
To a certain extent, Boston City Hall has been a case study for how far a general public will tolerate the architect as artist. Public opinion here seems to often contradict itself: at once, there is a bemoaning of the loss of an architecture of grandeur and a desire to keep the architect in check, lest their megalomania run rampant. Yet both of these qualities would appear to characterize a much-beloved building like the aforementioned St. Paul’s. Perhaps this sort of conflicting stance is one result of how the architectural profession has gotten tangled up with corporate interests, so that most new “visionary” buildings of today are not just enormous but also resemble mono-statements buttressing the economic invulnerability of corporate hegemony. Certainly, this appears to be the primary legacy of a living, highly successful architect like Norman Foster. It is also perhaps a result of the ways in which the question of architecture has usually been made into a question of “style”, applied very broadly, and often indicative of that general division between lay and specialist sensibilities, as seen with the varying attitudes regarding the archaeological-cum-populist endeavor of the J. Paul Getty Museum (now the Getty Villa).
One of the many questions which remain is how the apparent inversion of value assignment Boston City Hall represents is effectively communicated as aspirational — because, by a lot of lay accounts, this communication has not occurred. To many, McKinnell’s anecdote might only illustrate how a public was drawn into a formal dispute and saddled with an argument’s midpoint, rather than its solution.
But the attempt to find a hard correlation between form and sociocultural effect seems as hopeless as it is reductive. For the specialist, it is an extension of the long-attractive notion that architecture is a language, and each building an essay made up of lexical units. For the layperson, it is a faith in a perennial art which found its highest expression somewhere in a virtuous Past. Each is a potent idea undermined by its rigidity. Sardonically, the late architect and author Charles Jencks wrote, of (the also-late) architect Andrew Derbyshire’s statement for the Hillingdon Civic Centre, “There follows the grandiose claims that the building will break down administrative barriers and get everyone talking cordially with their elected representatives, as if the friendliness of the forms would suddenly induce a corresponding outbreak of hospitality in the neighborhood.” As the adoring treatment of Boston’s Citgo sign has (somewhat depressingly) shown, meaning can, and often does, arise which has little or nothing to do with visual content. Like the Eiffel Tower, the most influential factor informing meaningful cultural contracts can be just the fact of the structure’s presence. Of course, this accruing of meaning through site — and time — can involve other factors. Clearly, a predictable discourse has played just as much of a role in informing people’s ideas about Boston City Hall as the building itself, if not more so.
Like so many other things today, the once-forward-looking qualities of Boston City Hall seem now more retrospective than prospective, siting the building within its own romantic past and alternate future. Naturally, the romantic always obscures, and City Hall also stands right among Boston’s mid-century, class-contemptuous attempt at “urban renewal.” For those within living memory of this displacement, Boston City Hall and its often-vacant plaza could very well be the perfect symbol of a city ready to do violence on select inhabitants out of concern for the projection of a certain public image. In one regard, City Hall represents vast civic mistreatment and cultural erasure: a loss. In a separate regard, City Hall may, for some appreciators, represent a time when architecture could be controversial for reasons more than sheer scale, the disruption of the existing urban fabric, or mere blandness. Another loss.
City Hall still stands out like a reverberating and monstrous exclamation every time you round the bend towards it from either side along Cambridge Street. The word monster derives from monere: "to remind, bring to (one's) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach." Accordingly, the mythologically monstrous emerges to guide one towards deeper comprehensions. Ugliness is a transgression: the intrusion of the asymmetrical into the symmetrical; the sudden growth of a protuberance from a smooth, seemingly sterile surface; the greenish cadaver sliced up, yielding a new visceral secret. Like the trickster archetype, it can be both a threat and a stimulant. Here, I think of John Summerson's conclusion to his 1945 essay on the Victorian architect William Butterfield: "Taste is the smiling surface of a lake whose depths are great, impenetrable and cold. At unpredictable moments the waters divide, the smooth surface vanishes and the depths are revealed. But only for a moment and the storm leaves nothing but ripples on the fresh, icy surface."
Perhaps what Boston City Hall can be said to most powerfully express is another one of those victories of the unintentional over the intentional — the victory of the human imagination and its ability to conceive of new “irrational” realities, borrowed from old ones and reconfigured. Here, the seat of government lies on the vertex of a duality, like some old god, ready to either listen to or crush the masses — not so dissimilar of an effect from the Palace of Justice in Brussels. And if gods are going to be invoked, it’s apt to consider the frequent comparisons of so-called brutalist architecture to the ziggurat; and that City Hall, as modern ziggurat, is inverted, with its widest section as cornice. Here, man has replaced the gods, and is offered entrance at the once-apex, now ground story. Retrospective and prospective; a gesture as democratic as it is hubristic. City Hall is a fantasy: a monstrous fantasy which dares ruination through elected tyranny as much as it dares the utopia of godless-yet-godful man, new determiner of fate. What could be more out of date and yet forward-looking than that?