Should they stay or should they go? A tale of two buildings.
Who would have thought it? The city of Birmingham, England, has a large, centrally located public library that is almost a dead ringer for our own, monstrous City Hall. And guess what - they are thinking of tearing it down.
It's not clear whether the Birmingham building, built by architect John Madin in 1974, is a copy of Noel McKinnell and Gerhard Kallmann's '60s-era, Brutalist City Hall, which was a "celebrity" building of its time. Architects prefer to say that both buildings were "inspired" by Le Corbusier's famous monastery, Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, in southern France.
Just as Mayor Tom Menino can't stop yapping about how awful City Hall is, the Birmingham Library has its high-profile opponents. His Royal Highness Prince Charles, who likes to pop off on subjects like organic gardening and architecture, says the library looks "more like a place for burning books than keeping them." Chuck's comments contrast with those of former prime minister Harold Wilson, who had hailed the Birmingham building as "a great leap forward" for Britain's second-largest city.
The two proposed demolitions raise an important issue: As public tastes swing from generation to generation, will more buildings simply be torn down? Right now, the precast concrete Brutalism of the 1960s - Paul Rudolph's hideous Lindemann Center near City Hall, and his disastrous urban redevelopment of New Haven, Conn., are prime examples - is out of fashion. But does that mean we should tear down Rudolph's amazing University of Massachusetts campus in Dartmouth, one of my favorite architectural shrines in the state? If possible, that site is more hated than City Hall; the state fired Rudolph before the commission had been completed.
Or what about the garishly modern Stata Center at MIT, an unsuccessful piece of self-plagiarism by starchitect Frank Gehry? When tastes swing back to International-style formalism (think of the Hancock Building in Copley Square), as they inevitably will, should Stata come down?
Hubert Murray, the current president of the Boston Society of Architects, says no. The BSA has come out against razing City Hall, and would prefer to rejigger the site to make it more pleasing to humans. (Some local architects offer up designs for possible reuse of City Hall in ArchitectureBoston's current issue, available online at architectureboston.com.) Murray doesn't oppose demolitions in principle; he is far from sure that the Birmingham Library is worth saving. But he does oppose tearing down City Hall.
Murray worries that younger Bostonians don't appreciate the context that birthed City Hall - the dramatic, Ed Logue/John Collins revisioning of downtown Boston. "The younger generation, who don't understand what the state can do for them, puts no value on what the government did for a decaying city," he says. "They accept the total fungibility of buildings rather than valuing them as cultural assets."
When I mentioned that Stata seemed like a building that wouldn't outlive its vogue, Murray disagreed. "You have to give buildings like that one or two generations to see what they mean. I would argue forcefully for the concept of the 'slow demolition movement.' It's very easy to destroy and very hard to create."
Understandably, architect Madin has spoken out against the destruction of his Birmingham handiwork. "I don't believe it will go," Madin told the Guardian newspaper. "But the fact that there have been attempts to destroy it and replace it with a commercial building is not only sad but stupid."
That's Menino's idea, to turn his downtown site over to commercial developers and to relocate the city's business to South Boston. I supported the idea when he first floated it, and I support it now. Beautiful work can spring from fertile ground. Paris tore down Les Halles, the city's storied steel-and-glass marketplace, to make room for the Centre Pompidou arts center, initially derided as a "sugar refinery from outer space." A generation has fallen in love with Pompidou; I suspect young people are already agitating for it to come down.
Great architects like Kallmann, McKinnell, Rudolph, and Henry Cobb, who gave us both the Hancock Tower and the terrible master plan for City Hall plaza, make mistakes. What is that old saying? Doctors bury their mistakes; lawyers send theirs off to jail. Maybe architects will have to get used to the notion that their mistakes are going to be torn down.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
