Boston City Hall is a sublime architectural expression of the maxim, “you can’t fight city hall”. It’s an inhuman, authoritarian concrete bunker that makes the citizen feel lower than rat shit. Its highest artistic purpose would be if it were demolished with high explosives to celebrate the Fourth of July.
I completely disagree— walking around inside Boston City Hall, and any well-designed Brutalist building in general, makes you feel like you’re in some sort of natural rock formation.
Brutalism prizes honesty over anything else— the necessary structural elements are the form, and everything else gets out of the way. And that’s why walking through a good Brutalist building often feels refreshing, or like you’re an explorer:
Have you ever walked inside of a natural rock formation? Like a cave or something? They look nothing like that. Those photos look like the inside of a prison.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/TIM5CMDTIZAKTFO3HKJMXZU6VE.jpg){kind=link}
