On City Hall: toward the mutability of a concrete structure

I WOULD like to join the discussion started in last Sunday's op-eds that ran under the headline "Siting City Hall," about Mayor Menino's proposal to move the city offices.

Architects should realize that the client's detailed list of activities and spaces planned for a building, which forms the basis for the design, will probably be out of date before the doors even open.

This is especially true for large buildings full of complex, interrelated functions, such as a city hall, in a time of rapid technological change, such as now. How well a building accommodates these changes is, to my mind, a major factor in judging the design's success.

Michael McKinnell, one of the architects of City Hall, came up with an odd building to accommodate change, as he says it does ("Doing more with what we have," Henry A. Wood). Rather than "never being finished," everything in this City Hall is set, literally, in concrete.

I suppose a large part of my feeling comes from being the project manager for our firm, which converted the old Five Cents Savings Bank ( Kallman, McKinnell and Wood's second Boston building) into the Borders Books and Music there now. It wasn't easy. We couldn't move so much as a thermostat, with all its buried controls, without huge expense and difficulty. Anyone trying to "humanize" (Wood's word) City Hall and correct its many flaws will face similar problems.

SAMUEL S. HURD
Boston
The writer is an associate with Bergmeyer Associates Inc.

"WHY CITY HALL is worth saving" by Donlyn Lyndon, the noted architect, writer, and professor, should be required reading for everyone concerned about Boston's past and future. Lyndon's historical perspective and incisive commentary offer an instructive, educated take on a work of architecture that too often is seen only in subjective terms.

Looking afresh at City Hall, we might interpret its locked doors and blocked staircases as an indictment, not of the building, but of our civic life, and as evidence of our lack of commitment to occupying fully a demanding but generous structure. This is a building that wants to be open, porous, and accessible, with the city flowing through it as a vital expression of urban democracy. Never truly finished or furnished, City Hall challenges us to complete it, not to abandon it. For the City of Boston to inhabit this structure properly, even aggressively, 40 years after its construction would be a great act of sustainable design on a civic scale.

GARY WOLF
Boston
The writer is a Boston architect and vice president of the New England chapter of DOCOMOMO, an international organization for the preservation of modern architecture.

MAYOR MENINO'S proposal to trash City Hall, as recently discussed in Donlyn Lyndon's eloquent op-ed, is being promoted as a big idea. But it's only big in the sense that it's dumbfoundingly bad -- like paying O. J. Simpson to write his memoirs, invading Iraq, or selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees. It would leave future generations wondering: What were they thinking?

City Hall has long been in need of sensitive and imaginative renovation to meet current needs, and the usual swings of taste have left it -- for the moment -- decidedly out of fashion. So it is an inviting target for demagogic attacks. But it is, in fact, a major work of architecture -- ambitiously conceived, executed with great subtlety, intelligence, and skill, vividly representative of its cultural moment, and located at the historic heart of the city. To destroy it, especially to facilitate a dubious real estate deal, would be the worst kind of cultural vandalism.

Here is a genuinely big idea. Boston's politicians should take pride in this city's heritage of courageously innovative architecture, show leadership in respecting and protecting it, and learn how to accommodate growth and change through the combination of careful conservation with imaginative transformation. That's much harder work than concocting simplistic wreck-and-redevelop schemes, but it would demonstrate the maturity and grace expected of a truly world-class city.

WILLIAM J. MITCHELL
Cambridge
The writer is professor of architecture and media arts and sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.