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One of the ugliest freaking buidlings in all of Boston
By adamg on Wed, 01/16/2008 - 3:27pm
Beantown Caffee wags his finger in the direction of the Hampton Inn and Suites at Melnea Cass Blvd. and Mass. Ave.:
[W]henever I drive by this horrifying excuse of architecture I cringe. ...
Complete with photo so you can judge for yourself. I'll still argue that the Hurley Building is Boston's ugliest building.
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Comments
He's right
It is the new look for Boston that Menino is trying hard to sell to the public. He's not alone in pushing it, as it can be seen elsewhere.
Random, jagged or bulging lines, cheap-looking prefab exteriors indistinguishable from one building to the next. Pedestrians are met with endless blank walls of the aforementioned prefab concrete or plastic-looking paneling, with huge tinted windows that either reflect the street back onto itself, or give a glimpse into sterile, overly-bright interiors best suited to a burn unit.
Entrances are intended to be reached by car, but those who insist on traveling by foot must make their way down barren windswept sidewalks and across equally desolate brick-paved plazas decorated with a handful of saplings or low bushes.
For the lack of a better term, I refer to it as the "Generic Suburban Office Park-izaton" of the metro area, and it can be best seen in Kendall Square or the Waterfront District, though those new, and absolutely horrific white plastic boxes across from Lechmere station are worth a special mention.
Boston is cursed with a ton
Boston is cursed with a ton of Brutalist architecture. That seems to mean very ugly concrete in bad proportions. City Hall is the top offender, and I wouldn't shed a tear if mumbles can really get the waterfront town hall built.
I was always pretty curious about the big concrete tower (in the middle of a district of 3-deckers and other short buildings) in East Cambridge, the one with the band of orange about 3/4 of the way up. You can see it from Kendall, the McGrath, and 93. Is it apartments? Office space? An unholy monument to conrete?
No, it's the Middlesex County Courthouse and jail
And it's about to close for extensive renovation. Unfortunately this does not involve any changes to the exterior.
That's no apartment complex
That's the Middlesex County courthouse and jail. I think the prisoners are up above the orange band.
Yup
Yes, the prison is on the top two floors, and I can honestly say I've been up there -- but only on the right side of the bars. (I clerked for a judge at that court house while in law school, and he chaired a prisoner's rights committee. Really, I swear. That's how I met Jorge Quiroga, too -- at one of the committee meetings, not in a cell. Really.)
I'd rather keep a Brutalist
I'd rather keep a Brutalist relic than have some equally-hideous replacement built that can't be reached by a rapid transit line. And no, the Silver Line is not rapid transit in the slightest. Cramped, unreliable bus that runs along the bumpiest billion dollar tunnel ever imagined.
The mayor's plan to built a satellite office in Dudley Sq as part of the relocation plan is basically an admission that the new city hall wouldn't be able to replicate the services of the present structure. Much of this would have to do with its lack of accessibility. However, since the mayor wants Boston to become a car-dependent city where the only pedestrian activity is going to and from a parking garage.
If they tore down City Hall
If they tore down City Hall you can be sure the replacement would be one of these cheap crappy looking pseudo buildings.
There's an uglier hotel in the same neighborhood...
That building isn't so great, but it's no Best Western Roundhouse Suites!
http://www.bestwesternboston.com/
ugh.
Heh.
That's the one I was picturing when I first read this post. I hear the round rooms are even uglier on the inside.
Ugh
Definitely ugly - ALL of them.
Side question: I wonder how many folks book rooms from out-of-town, via the internet, only to discover that they're NOT downtown?
(At the hotels, I mean; not the Hurley :-) )
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
But that's a reuse of an old building
I don't remember what it was before, but it was not built as a hotel. Some industrial use, I think.
An explosive past
Former natural-gas tank.
Hurley Building
The Hurley Building has an important redeeming feature: it is, to my eyes, a better example of brutalist architecture than City Hall. That means that we can raze City Hall, and still keep a shining example of brutalist architecture only blocks away.
It's always seemed to me a frightening coincidence that the Hurley Building has the Department of Mental Health, because if any building could make you go crazy...
lots and lots of ugly
but the ugliest by far is city hall. one cannot argue that that place is THE ugliest building in all of the northeast. all other ugly buildings are wannabes.
Ugliest building is none of the above
It is the Government Center Garage, which looms above Haymarket Square, turns a block of Congress Street into a dismal tunnel, and cuts off the Bulfinch Triangle from the rest of the city. It has recently been sold, and I hope the developer who bought it plans to remove it soon.
hear hear!
I completely agree. That garage kills Congress Street, dividing it like a
helicopter bladeSherman tank to the stomach.It took me awhile to appreciate city hall plaza (well not the plaza itself, but the buildings around it--
Did you ever notice that from Tremont Street, even as far back as the Granary Burying Ground, you can see the old north church? Given the former slope of the city hall site, the lower buildings, and the openness of scollay square I imagine that was a viewshed that existed prior to City Hall as well, and the layout of the site we see is a result of wanting to keep that. Not that this is a great solution, but I imagine the people who say fill the plaza with a hotel or a 20000 sf building would be the first to piss and moan about losing that view (once they were informed it existed)
i think city hall is really terrible at ground level, the brick ramparts, a windowless one story apron, but from that up I think its rather neat, and downright beautiful on a misty night, bathed in eerie green light.
The JFK building, at least the vertical towers part, is excellent to my eye. Really nicely proportioned, the protruding mullion thingies around the windows have a nice rhythm, and of course the rounded corners are the detail that makes it.
The arched building across cambridge street is pretty bad, though it works at the ground level and fits the site.
Whats more of a crime than the design of the Hurley building (one of my least liked) is how the state abuses the public space around it. What should be (and once was) a little plaza in front is an impromptu parking lot-- they were even brazen enough to go beyond temporaryness and put in a guard booth. I think that's a crime, and that the BRA aren't showing up with the original public space agreements and their lawyers is a farce. Also they use the sidewalk for parking as well.
Every year the city hall plaza creeps closer to parking lot as well. Any given day one can see 7-10 trucks, cars, vans parked in front. They have storage locker in the recesses at the side. It has been over half a decade since 9/11 but they still havent had a better solution to the security problem than to have temporary barricades around the entire perimeter.
Not all of the buildings in boston designed by this generation of late modernists/brutalists is so bad as the hurley or that garage. Paul Rudolph's other building on Federal Street near South Station is quite nice, and is a great public space as well (kudos to the private owners for valuing public space, unlike our own "public" agencies). Also the north end branch library is gem, though the new landscape and entry court is trite, and kills the experience of entering the building.
Palladium Windows
I've always gone for International Place. Not only is it ugly (in large part due to its ridiculous windows) but its a signature building on the Boston skyline. I does way more damage than the Hampton Suites.
Can you even see through those?
Palladium is a transition metal similar to platinum. It must be very expensive, and is shiny and weather resistant. Very chic! :-)
I think you mean "palladian" windows? The 90s were known architecturally for an outbreak of "palladian pollution" both on large urban buildings and McMansions alike.
I stand corrected
Yeah, I thought I was getting that wrong, but obviously failed to right myself in time. In my defense, 35,600 other people are wrong according to Google which is why it failed to correct me. hehe
International Place is a superfund site for Palladian pollution. Even the Mayor was offended, I gather, which is why the follow-up tower at International Place has the equally ugly but at least not arched windows.
I half wonder if the building wasn't designed as a joke. Like, the client asked for some completely inappropriate palladian windows and the architect passive aggressively designed the building with nothing but only to have it be accepted.
As a general rule
PoMo architecture looks like cheap, gaudy crap.
Palladian windows however, are no match for...well...I really don't know the appropriate technical term for it, but this
Wow
I bet you the architect of that thing grew up in the 60s, because back then, there was this construction-kit toy that consisted of red plastic "girders" and flimsy plastic windows that looked pretty much like the ones on that building.
I know exactly what you're
I know exactly what you're talking about, and I would have done anything for something like that growing up in the '80s. I can't remember the name of it, but I believe it was out of production by the early '70s.
The sad thing is, that design, and that of the 50,000 copycats in the Boston Metro are terrible-looking bastardizations of what was possible with that kit.
Bonus points
Give the guy props for meeting Boston's Minimum Brick Ratio, at least.
They were construx in the 80's
Of course, in 10 years when the children of the 80's are regularly designing buildings, it means we'll have a ton of yellow or smoke tinted windows in big huge panels and grey steal beams.
Woody Click Buildings
My son, who aspires to one day design stuff like buildings and interior habitats, refers to these structures as "woody click" buildings.
He's seen these building sets in the Construction Zone in Waltham, and played with the samples. When we were in Chicago, Portland, San Diego, Toronto, and while in Boston and NYC too, he's been pointing these buildings out right and left. He specfically notes the buildings under construction with the pre-fab panels, cranes, etc.
(NOTE: he might have the brand name wrong - I think this is closer to what he is describing)
I think it is the prefab panels that are driving the Woody Click Building Boom.