Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and the Boston Landmarks Commission have announced the local landmark designation of Boston City Hall, the brutalist building that has been loved and hated in equal measure since even before the building designed by Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles opened in 1969.
Heroic, not brutalist, is the term Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, and Chris Grimley used to describe concrete buildings, like Boston City Hall, that were built in the Massachusetts capital in the 1960s. Their book Heroic was published in 2015, when the term “brutalist” and the architecture it was shorthand for — monumental buildings structured with exposed concrete, often finished with textured surfaces — had fallen out of favor; the word “heroic” was an attempt to shift perception away from a loaded term and toward the commendable aspects of Boston's remarkable density of mid-century concrete buildings. While the pendulum has shifted over the last ten years back to a wider appreciation of such buildings, as witnessed by numerous coffee table books with Brutalist in their title and the fairly positive reception for the movie The Brutalist, opponents of modern architecture continue to use brutalism as a symbol of all that is bad in architecture and to call for their demolition (the FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, being the latest).
Into this continued polarization over brutalism comes the January 24 announcement of the official designation of Boston City Hall as a local landmark. The designation, which happened in December 2024, “recognizes Boston City Hall’s architectural, cultural, and civic significance, ensuring the preservation of its unique character and historical identity for future generations.” In a statement, Mayor Wu describes the building as “a hub where residents come together to shape our city’s future,” and “a symbol of our city’s resilience, innovation, and commitment to our constituents.” The landmarking will protect the architectural character of the building but also allow for much-needed upgrades.
Boston City Hall was designed by the firm of Gerhard Kallmann and N. Michael McKinnell in 1961, following from a master plan by I. M. Pei that put the civic structure at the center of a larger Government Center. Like other projects in American cities at the time, the site was created by the clearance of a neighborhood deemed derelict, Scollay Square, with smaller blocks assembled into larger superblocks. While the concrete surfaces, bold sculptural facades, cantilevered upper floors, and soaring entrance gain the most attention, the building is balanced by the sloping plaza, designed by the same architects, as space that was renovated just a few years ago by Sasaki. Just as the plaza renovation addressed accessibility and other issues, future work on the Boston City Hall, following from a Getty-funded Conservation Management Plan published in 2021, will address accessibility and other deficiencies all allow the building to be used by all members of the public for decades to come.