Why City Hall is worth saving
"SELLING City Hall" used to be a metaphor of contempt. Now, it seems, in its literal sense, there are those who deem it a clever real estate move. Some, surely, see in that move short-term financial or political advantage.
All this flies in under cover of the oft-repeated mantra of public distaste for the City Hall building. OK, it's big, even awesome, in the original sense of the word. The Boston City Hall carries an authority that results from the clarity, articulation, and intensity of imagination with which it has been formed. References to New Brutalism trivialize the building's achievement.
What's called for now is not abandonment, but the addition of a comparable intensity of attention to how people might engage this place and their government.
This is not, of course, the first time that symbolic government buildings have fallen out of favor. After the State House was ensconced on Beacon Hill in the magnificent Charles Bulfinch building, the fortunes of the Old State House declined, passing through a phase when it too was deemed superfluous; there was, reputedly, a scheme to sell it and have it moved away. Imagine downtown Boston with the Old State House blown away. I'd rather not. Much more imaginatively, a subway stop was built beneath it. Demolition of the Central Artery has cleared the view all the way up from the reaches of Long Wharf to its tower and face, connecting the building to the harbor and the sea.
As for the present City Hall, its bones are surely strong enough to accommodate change. Don't obsess with whether or not you like the building. Consider it a venerable part of the larger public realm. The first buildings of Boston were just two blocks away. This is where the core of city government ought to be.
There's another issue at play here, not to be overlooked. City Hall is the first major building by architects Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, who have, in the intervening decades, created a distinguished body of work in Boston, bringing to the city a series of remarkably fine buildings, including the nearby Boston Five Cents Savings Bank (now a Borders bookstore), Back Bay Station, and additions to Hynes Auditorium. More even than either Bulfinch or H. H. Richardson, City Hall's architects have persistently expanded, refined, and altered the architectural vocabulary of their buildings. Each is particularly suited to its place. As the inception of this trail of civic accomplishment, the City Hall building would in itself bear preservation as a marker of historic importance in the annals of American architecture, and Boston's pride.
To lay waste to a great building that is positioned so effectively and created with such vigor and skill is a foolhardy proposition.
Donlyn Lyndon, the former head of the department of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of "The City Discovered: Boston." 
