BOSTON CITY HALL

Designed by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles; completed 1969
Boston, Massachusetts
The Boston City Hall is a modern architectural icon that has served and identified the
citizens of Boston since 1969. It is the product of the Boston architectural firm Kallmann,
McKinnell and Knowles, now Kallmann, McKinnell and Wood, and a national design
competition held in 1962. The site is in the center of the historic Boston urban fabric in a
plaza created by architect I.M.Pei. The trapezoidal site, comparable in scale to St. Mark’s
Square in Venice, provides one of the earliest modern exterior public spaces in a large
American city.
Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, along with Edward Knowles, formed their
office with this project. Kallmann, the eldest member of the team, German born and
English educated, provided the philosophical expressions of the theory and the design
ideas. McKinnell, English born and educated, has shared Kallmann’s inclusive and
sensitive approach to architecture for all the years of the office’s existence. Both have
served as practicing architects, as educators at the Harvard Graduate School of Design,
and as researchers and historians. Henry Wood joined the firm in 1965.
The Boston City Hall expresses the design quality and philosophy of the firm. It is the
historical foundation of its design credits and the initial expression of its goals achieved
in the built environment. It is not easy to understand the building without a context or
background in architecture. At the same time, it is a building much appreciated and
generally valued and approved by architects and architecture critics.
Writing in Architecture Forum in 1959, Gerhard Kallmann, as an educator, not yet practicing or having
designed the City Hall, sought to generate a new spirit of creativity in architectural
designers. Modernism as a style dominated the architectural scene, and its success was
multiplied by the large amounts of construction in the postwar period that conveyed that
visual image. It was a time of rigid stylistic dogma, well-established rules, and culturally
defined and accepted physical forms. In the face of systems processes and deterministic
products, Kallmann argued for and encouraged young architects to maintain confidence
in the traditional architectural problem-solving processes and insights. As Kallmann
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 288
demonstrates in the Boston City Hall, it is critical that human emotions and expressions
overcome system processes that produce homogeneous and stylistically dead
metropolitan environments.
In place of static modernism design approaches, Kallmann and McKinnell
championed the “New Brutalism” style. The work of Le Corbusier and the refining
qualities of Louis Kahn’s work served as springboards for the office to create a new
physical expression with a new direction affording new opportunities within the modern
movement. In a lecture in 1959, Kallmann stated that this new direction “in its physical
concreteness and firmness of build, strives for a confirmation of identity and existence to
counter the modern fear of nothingness.”
As a development of Kahn’s ideas of rigor and order within the context of New
Brutalism, form, symbolism, function, and technology are balanced and integrated in the
Boston City Hall. Form is the classical tripartite massing of base, body, and cap. Contrast
and tension in this scheme is achieved by inverting the masses. The large, ordered, and
repetitive office spaces are at the top. The body, or central portion of the tower,
symbolically expresses the central government process of council and mayor with clear
and bold forms. The base is open and accessible, inviting and encouraging the public to
enter and traverse the dramatic, interpenetrating interior arrival and circulation spaces.
The entire project is set on a brick plaza base that serves as a public
gathering space and a Boston focal point. As an exterior circulation area, it
encourages movement through the plaza into the building and around to
Faneuil Hall, the markets, and the waterfront.
The symbolism of the government is expressed as both authoritarian and
human, inviting participation by the citizenry of Boston. There is a clear
expression of the government functions within a complexity that invites
interest and a desire to be included.
One element that fails in this openness and opportunity for public involvement is the
long, high wall along Congress Street. It reflects the quality of monumental, institutional
scale typical of the modern artifacts at the time of its design. The wall serves as a brick
barrier, unsympathetic to the pedestrian path at its side.
Analysis of the architecture of the Boston City Hall reveals an uncommon balance
between the need to provide form, function, and technology. The integration of
environmental systems with the building structure and form is well studied and
developed. In what has become for the firm an opportunity to explore and express the
central concepts of their design philosophy, the structural elements serve not only to
support the building loads but also to formally become elements of style that define entry,
wall, space, and program.
Daylighting and electric lighting are integrated so as to reveal the total architecture
and provide a cohesive fabric that underlies the total experience. The integration of the
air-handling ducts within the columns and beams successfully provides the services of the
system without focusing attention on the technology.
The use of exposed concrete as the building material is an issue for some of those who
are accustomed to the softer textures and feel of wood and the more human scale of
masonry. Concrete is a cold, hard material, lacking the scale of detail in classical
masonry and stone construction. One must realize that this type of construction was new
and provided the opportunity for the “Brutal” style of modern architecture to come into
being. This building, through detail and complexity of form and scale, overcomes the
lack of historic context and precedence. However, the grayish values remain cold and
provide a counterresistance to the open, inviting appearance.
Today, although the building is recognized as an architectural icon, societal changes
and the growth of the Boston City government have generated calls for renovation and
even replacement. The biggest disappointment is the failure of the surrounding urban
community to successfully develop the plaza boundaries and walls. The exterior space
fails to provide the human qualities of scale, texture, and meaning that are so
characteristic of the historic Boston urban scene. The surrounding structures have not
provided the sense of place and balance of enclosure, entry, passage, and definition that is
characteristic of European piazzas. The reference to the comparable size of St. Mark’s
Square is limited to that parameter.
Despite these qualifications, the Boston City Hall is a building of quality and historic
significance. The style, program, holistic expression, and historic significance in the
annals of modern architecture make it one of the truly great buildings in the United
States.