#boston brutalist

[docileeffects]

[humanoidhistory]

1970 postcard from the New England Aquarium in Boston.

[marzipanandminutiae]

Area Bostonian Woman Had To Go To City Hall Today; Still Shaking Like Rescue Chihuahua About It

[doshmanziari]

Ugliness Writ Large: Beyond Boston City Hall

Hello, everyone.

I have a new essay available on Substack, entitled "Ugliness Writ Large: Beyond Boston City Hall."

Here, I use the Boston City Hall building, completed in 1968, and the fairly stable discourse which has surrounded it, to explore several matters of aesthetics, including the perception of ugliness.

A lot has been written on City Hall during its fifty-five years, and, if I may say so, I think this is one of the better essays devoted to it from the past decade, and one of my better pieces on art and architecture.

Bye!

[brianfrench1995]

Boston City Hall fountain 1972 postcard 

@postcardtimemachine

[mysterygoo]

Christian Science Plaza, 2024

Pentax K1000 | Ilford HP5+ 400

[brutalistnortheast]

225 Franklin st Boston MA

[nevermissblog]

the contrast of nature’s warm, green vs reinforced concrete--cold, grey,  is always enjoyable.If you enjoy something; take a picture, and go back to it at a later time, then you will notice the real beauty. If something is beautiful, your mind will memorize it. This is a corner of the Commonwealth Building, West End, Boston, 2022. Arch. Paul Rudolph 

[tekaihau]

Bullying E about the local inspiration for a description of semi-brutalist architecture in his project, all is right with the world

[youzicha]

I survived the cop killer slide!

The entire City Hall Plaza Playground was A+ awesome: stark square concrete play shapes, and the background is dominated by the world-famous Brutalist landmark, Boston City Hall. Moulding the aesthetic sensibilities of the little tykes while they are receptive.

[twin-azure-dragon-wave]

Boston City Hall ends up on a lot of those ugliest buildings/worst examples of brutalist architecture lists and it's pretty easy to see why

[burlveneer-music]

Sweeping Promises - Good Living Is Coming For You - some great post-punk out of Kansas as well

A band famous for their unfussy, monolithic anthems, Sweeping Promises elegantly ravage us again with another future classic. They return as a fist of velvet rose petals roaring inside a compact wrecking ball. Gone is the Boston brutalist ambience of their subterranean concrete laboratory and the revelatory single mic recording technique. In its place, a retired and resplendent nude painting studio in Lawrence, Kansas, bathed in light with high ceilings and hardwood floors. Guided once again by their surrounding architecture, a reverb-rich space remains the defining element at the heart of their highly stylized sound. A watery ghost from the golden age of art-punk now wields sharper knives and more microphones. If the mood of HFAWO was hungry, GLICFY is RAVENOUS. In 2023, appetite is addressed in new ways: Power struggles are aired in “Eraser,” restraints are broken in “You Shatter,” anguished exclamations sting in “Good Living Is Coming for You.” The taboo subject of aging is (s)heroically dragged out into the open. Every line is delivered with such joyous, soaring layers that each punch lands like a chef’s kiss. Sweeping Promises are Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug. A chance meeting in Arkansas led to a decade of playing in an eclectic assortment of projects together. Their relentless practice made perfect. Bass playing Lira is an emotive bolt of thunderous energy with the iconic blast of a girl group rolled into one robust throat. Caufield is an intentional guitar player and drummer. No note or hit is extraneous. Together they are meticulous sound engineers, using space as a key ingredient to their distinct sound. Controlling every aspect of their craft, from the first note they write together, all the way through to the final mastering process, each record is an unspoiled fingerprint unique to their dynamic chemistry.

[professorlizzard]

Week #30

204. Food And Drug Administration: A pristine office building, not a smudge. The Cats from Eelgland might not be fantastic cooks, but they do know how to keep a kitchen clean. Whenever they visit a restaurant, their owners tremble in fear as much as they are afraid of Spices and Flavours.

205. Revenue Service: A grey and tall brutalist building. This is where the greyest accountants of the fear weasels lurk, putting sums together. Sounds like a horribly tedious job... but the fear weasels enjoy horror.

206. The Parent-Teacher Education Of The Great Voyage: A schoolhouse, or rather, several adjoining classrooms. Here the members debate and argue about how to make education better for the children of all the diplomats and the tourist trap operators that make up this city. The group is more also calls themselves Nobody, due to misguided ideas on branding, (Tricking people to say "Nobody is improving education" is not really as useful as they think it is).

207. The Categorical Imperative: A purple and blue nightclub. To get in, you must know the password, which you can only get by doing favours for certain specific people, as a show of power. The sole three cats who managed to this are very bored of each other, and are hoping for a fourth person to finally get an invite.

208. The Horror Of Cinema: The mansion of a famous horror movie director, Boston Spheric. Oh, he doesn't dare to live here, it turned out so frightening, even he is scared of it. Many people take pilgrimige to bask in the dark radiance of this old master.

209. Curriculum For Diplomacy: An intense diplomat training facility. Under the guiding hand of Miliphon, famous orator, you shall learn the secrets of charisma! Supposedly at least, some suspect this is mainly a way to stroke the ego of Miliphon.

210. Kitchens From The Void Inside Strange Space: The set for a terrifying cooking show! A great old one, one of the few who actually like being treated like a celebrity travels kitchens, and will declare them to be UNFIT or ACCEPTABLE, and CURSE or BLESS them accordingly. Right now, he is traveling Hexaspace, and so far, the best and cleanest kitchen was found on Insectus, the world of knightly roaches.

[marzipanandminutiae]

hate this brutalism discourse (am on your side before that phrasing scares you lol) like the only people I have ever seen criticizing brutalism are in situations where people are changing or dismantling houses or features that already exist. and brutalism is a style so like if you’re using the word brutalist that inherently implies that you’re not talking about buildings that look that way out of necessity, it implies that you’re talking about a stylistic choice and choosing that style over others. an unfortunately, that style is simply ugly

Yes exactly.

Here's the thing of it for me. If you like brutalism, fantastic. Amazing. I genuinely wish you the concrete-est, grayest, cube-iest gray concrete cube home to ever grace the earth. And in conversations about public architecture, your voice has a place at the table. It's public! Taste is subjective! I and my mental scrapbook full of High Victorian Madness HousesTM deserve to be there, and so do you with your concrete cubes. And so does everyone except those developers who throw up shoddy glass temples to get-rich-quick real estate schemes. Amen.

However. How. Ever. Your personal aesthetic taste is not deeper than just that. And saying that someone must care more about aesthetics than human life just because they say "wow, I sure wish that housing were in a different style, personally!" is just moral clout-chasing on the Nothing Is Nuanced website.

(also speaking of brutalism destroying existing buildings, a moment of silence for Boston's own Scollay Square, once full of working-class housing and businesses)

(1880s)

(1940s)

(which was torn down to build this)

(Older buildings in the foreground were not part of Scollay Square; it was where the skyscrapers and our brutalist City Hall are today)

[nickdewolfarchive]

Boston, Massachusetts 1973

Boston Government Service Center

Photograph by Nick DeWolf https://www.flickr.com/photos/dboo/51049202717

#photography #film #35mm #color #boston #massachusetts #streetphotography #building #architecture #brutalist #1970s

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

I realized last night while reading a history of New York that the combination of my childhood brain with my adult brain produces this exact same precise sensation whenever I read an old city guidebook to New York or Boston, circa 1980.

The guidebook is going to talk about the World Trade Center or the towers at the World Financial Center or the Hancock building (often in a list, sometimes with an appraisal of which tower is best) -- and I'm going to go "oh," and then I'm going to look up at the skyline and see that the towers just aren't there. Then I'm going to try to like it, and tell myself it's for the better. But I'm going to find the whole thing -- the green glass, the vaguely tacky neoclassical/brutalist trappings -- not just dull and unimaginative and disappointing, but fundamentally wrong -- not a solution to the problem of rebuilding New York, but a limiting case for how to rebuild New York. It is a New York for people who like blandness and suburbs and everything in its place, not for New Yorkers.

And now it is here. I knew all this, rationally, years ago. But it still hits me viscerally -- in an "oh" and a look-up-at-the-skyline-and-expect-something-that-isn't-there manner. (And it produces the weird sensation that everything has been slowed down, so that the present is an eternal present, to be visited forever, an oppressive image of a deathless present. I'm aging, but the world has stopped moving. I look around, and it's all eternal present. It's not just that it feels like I should have seen the World Trade Center a long time ago, it's that it never should have been built at all. I'm aging, but not the world. They stole my future. And they're still right here, and I'm still here.)