The New Brutalism – She is So Old!
Others have written about the award Boston’s City Hall has won. The architecture is called ‘New Brutalism’. it is brutal, and ugly. It is an Orc of a building, pounding its boot into your head every day it stands.
I once worked in such a building, the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, in Detroit. I called it the ‘Basement in the Sky’. If I recall correctly, Dave Barry called this style “Municipal Parking Garage, without the Warmth”. The Frank had the cheerless plaza, it had the lightless halls in blackstone. The majesty of law, the mercy of justice? Abjure those, this is a bunker, a cold fortress, the hunkering of a people who have resigned themselves to never seeking anything greater than themselves at their worst. Even on the most wonderful day of summer The Frank was a cold rain in November of a building.
Make it functional, make it utilitarian, but whatever you do, do not make it a building for pride, do not make it a welcome addition to a community. Make it seem like the alien it is, the oppressor’s citadel, the concrete Dark Tower.
My dad worked in a building, Fordson High School, in Dearborn. (His classroom would be to the left of the picture; the upper windows to the right of the tower are the library; and a wonderful room of carved oak and murals on the upper walls it is.) This is what public buildings once looked like, when a community had pride and hope for the future. Expensive? Yes, but what a message the community then was saying to the community to be, and how proud the community that is now for what they have been given.
Cathedrals are called ‘Sermons in Stone’. We should be aware of that, because that what we build now is a message to those who come after – who we are, what we think of ourselves, our communities, what we care to bequeath to the future. What we make should be an inspiration, a call to greatness; not an acknowledgement of meanness, of cramped and closed horizons. Call it pride of culture, but we should not build without pride in ourselves, in our past, and without hope for the future. A bunker is not our model, ever.
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