Fighting (about) City Hall

Mayor Thomas M. Menino is giving another speech. Is he going to drop another development bombshell?

In two speeches last year, he proposed a new 1,000-foot-tall commercial tower on a downtown site already hemmed in by tall buildings. Then he proposed getting rid of City Hall and building a new one on the South Boston waterfront, near the new Institute of Contemporary Art.

On Tuesday comes the annual State of the City address. What will the mayor be suggesting now?

Will he say it's time to demolish the State House and turn that prominent site into a "development opportunity"?

Or will he react to the news that Chicago plans a 2,000-foot tower by doubling his own, in a kind of mayoral soapbox derby?

What's bothersome about the mayor's proposals is their lack of either simple logic or a larger vision.

He says, for example, that a city hall on the South Boston waterfront would stimulate development in that area, where it's been lagging.

Excuse me, but if the goal is to jump-start development in South Boston, isn't that where the 1,000-foot tower should go? Not in crowded downtown? If you build it downtown, won't it only suck activity away from South Boston?

You can't literally build a tower on the South Boston waterfront, to be sure, because height limits there are governed by flight paths out of Logan Airport . But there's plenty of room just the same. You could build a 1,000-foot -long groundscraper. Something like One-Two-Three Center Plaza, which is one of Boston's better buildings.

As for relocating City Hall, that makes even less sense. You'd be moving it away from the great site it now occupies -- near public transportation, near lawyers and businesses, near state and federal government. You'd be isolating it from the people who need it and use it.

My problem with the mayor is that his ideas don't seem to be part of any larger concept about the urban design of the city. They're just independent brainstorms. They have nothing to do with one another.

Last year, the mayor hired a top-notch city planner, Toronto-based Ken Greenberg , to think about the long strip of new land that is being created downtown, where the overhead artery used to be.

That land is owned by the state, and the city has little to say about it. But city land does, of course, come right up to it on both sides. Working with Boston's planning staff, Greenberg came up with a concept he calls the Crossroads Initiative. It will lace the city back together across the scar of the Big Dig. The laces will be green. They will be the key streets that cross the Dig, now to be transformed with tree plantings, wide sidewalks, and other amenities.

It's the kind of thoughtful, humane planning that makes a difference. And the mayor backs it. If it's fully implemented, he'll be leaving the legacy of a great public realm. That will mean more than a mislocated city hall, or a tower that is a mere gesture on the skyline.

From the point of view of urban design, buildings are secondary anyway. A city is made of streets and squares. It's made of spaces. The buildings are there to be the walls that shape the streets and squares. Hopefully, they're interesting walls -- walls with doors and windows that invite your imagination to come inside, walls with architectural detail that speaks of caring owners and artistic designers. But the spaces, not the buildings, are the public city.

We live in a culture that's so fascinated by objects that it ignores spaces. Maybe that's because we're so media-saturated. On a page or a screen, a building can be an icon. It's hard to represent the experience of an urban space so clearly.

It's interesting to recall that after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, more than one commentator predicted that no skyscrapers would ever be built again. They would be seen as potential targets. Nobody would willingly occupy them. Author James Howard Kunstler went as far as to predict that existing skyscrapers would probably be dismantled.

Exactly the opposite has occurred. Skyscrapers are shooting to record heights all over the world. There's something in the human psyche that deliberately chooses to live in dangerous places. We rebuild over the earthquake faults of California, we repopulate the land beneath Mount Vesuvius, we raise an even higher tower where the World Trade Center became a target for an air strike.

Both skyscrapers and city halls are potentially heroic objects. And the mayor is thinking about the city in terms of objects, not spaces. His proposals are the urban design equivalent, in the old but wonderful cliche, of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

We need a broader vision of the great public city of the future.

Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.