Bold Bastion

Architects these days get plenty of practice designing schools, office skyscrapers, hotels, apartment houses and churches. They are almost never called on to design city halls--and when they are, the bureaucratic clients, scared of offending constituents with something daring, usually settle for an ordinary, commercial-looking structure.

Boston has been braver. Five years ago it embarked on a project to demolish its seamy Scollay Square area and replace it with a 60-acre, twelve-building Government Center. The focus of the whole complex, according to the site plan drawn up by I. M. Pei & Associates, was to be a brand new city hall. Determined to have a stirring design, Boston held a nationwide architecture competition*that attracted 256 entrants, and the city appropriated $20 million for the building in advance.

Window for Complaints. The first results are now ready for viewing, and to celebrate the event, two-time Mayor John Collins (whose term expires Jan. 1) threw a housewarming for 1,500. City Hall is still five months from completion; yet Mayor Collins met with little dissent from local citizens when he boasted: "The verdict has already been rendered by all the architects who have seen it. This is the most exciting public building to be constructed in this country in this century."

The competition winners responsible for the new design are three previously almost totally unknown New York City designers teaching at Columbia: Gerhard Kallmann, Noel McKinnell and Edward Knowles. Of the three, only Knowles was then licensed to practice, and none of them had ever built a major structure of any kind before. In other words, they knew as much about what a city hall should be as most of their competitors.

"We decided to create big spaces where the people could come into contact with their government," explains Kallmann. "We wanted to draw them into it instead of letting them stand around outside." Thus, though the city hall is a bastion, it abounds in entrances, ramps, staircases, and a huge central courtyard--all suitable, as Kallmann points out, for sit-ins. Lower levels, which will have the most traffic, are reserved for public business, contain windows at which citizens can file complaints, get licenses, argue over assessments, and register to vote. Slung through the belly of the building, with hooded windows projecting outward, are the ceremonial rooms: on one side, the city council chamber; on the other, overlooking nearby historic Faneuil Hall, the mayor's office. Administrative work will be performed away from the bustle below in four projecting tiers of clerical offices that serve as the building's lid.

Rough & Tough. With every structural detail baldly visible, from the exposed air-conditioning ducts in the ceilings to the marks of the wooden forms on the poured concrete piers, the new city hall is more bold than beautiful. But it possesses a rough-and-tough force and assertiveness that Jack Kennedy might, with his Boston accent, have called "vigah." Predictably, it has drawn its quota of quips, being labeled variously "the blockhouse," "an upside-down pagoda," and "the tomb of Cheops." But informal polls indicate that an increasing number of secretaries and taxi drivers are coming to like it. The architects hope that with time the city hall will accumulate the usual collection of flags and trophies. "It should bear the marks of the people who use it," says McKinnell. And Kallmann thinks that the building is ready for all the coming wear and tear. Says he confidently: "It isn't so delicate that it can't take it."

*Though Finnish Architect Viljo Revell had won Toronto's city-hall competition four years earlier, the last contest for a municipal building in the U.S. was for San Francisco's city hall in 1909.

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