Our brutalist tower that never was

The building isn't easy to like, but anything that was interesting about the building has been made worse by the state neglect of the building.

- Parking put over the plaza along Staniford and Merrimack Sts.
- Fences put up all over the place, where ever there is seating to keep out the homeless.

I like the way the building (or more correctly the surrounding plaza) has organic lines.

Looks like the Ministry of Truth or something.

I personally love Rudolph’s buildings. But I’m an architecture nerd.

I agree about the neglect.

I've seen pictures of the completed complex. It was a nice design for the 1960s. Now it looks like something out of a bad 1950s space ship movie.

A few years ago, someone posted about this.. I can't remember if it was here or on aB, but someone replied and said they worked in the building and says there's all these doors and staircases in the existing building that go nowhere because they were suppose to connect to the tower that was never built.

I also agree with the comment below, this could be an architecture wonder if the state kept it up and not ignored maintenance like we do everywhere else in this state.

The existing building with the Lindemann MH Center is a perfect example of how to make a mental health facility hostile, scary, and foreboding to those with mental illness. The walls are sharp and jagged. Looking up at the building, you see giant hostile frogs (especially if you already have paranoid delusions).
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The architecture is so blatantly ill-suited for its intended use that it was a case-study in one of my urban studies/architecture classes in college.

One afternoon, I was looking for the Unemployment Office. I went into City hall looking for directions. The Greeter at City Hall directed me to the ugly building two blocks away. She was correct.

.... a shame the tower was never built. I’ve always liked Brutalist style. The Fascist style municipal buildings in Italy are stunning. I was in awe of the rows of Stalin era public housing outside Berlin.
To each his own but compare these to the glaring glass and chrome mega towers sprouting up all over Boston. To me, those are truly offensive.

go into the chapel. It's not normally open to the public, but the way the light works inside it is stunning.

Architects can be selected because of the budget proposal for the project meets government expectations. How a project budget is presented gets more consideration over aesthetics of design.

City Hall's appearance is nothing a few hundred thousand dollars worth of weathered brick veneer can't fix.

BOOM.

Faneuil Hall 2.

An AA meeting was held in a room in this building where there are dead planters. The planters have soil but nothing grows in them. Probably due to no maintenance as mentioned concerning other aspects of the building.

The meeting was in a room that did have an openness to it. So the room could pass for an open hall.

Entering the building felt like entering a place from which one never returns. To complete the feeling all that was needed was above the doorway, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." What an irony in a building concerned with mental health.

Why the lack of maintenance though? Perhaps related to why infrastructure is now failing. Decisions made years ago to abandon cities and relecting politicians whose campaign slogan boils down to "No taxes, No government." Elections that continue to play on the no taxes, no government mantra.

An urban environment costs more to maintain than a suburban or rural environment. When we want to add life time pensions including social security, medical care for poor and elderly, higher than 3rd world wages and lots of toys (replacing cell phones every 3 years is not cheap) the cost of living is not cheap. The more complicated our society with infrastructure, evolution of classes, need for social supports, the higher the cost in the one thing that everyone shares: cash.

Perhaps everyone who can pay more in taxes should. But there is one group of people who benefit far beyond in simple balance sheet wealth. They are the wealthy whose wealth buys them influence and power.

We can't assign a taxable value to influence and power. But we can assign a taxable value to income. So those who are wealthiest and therefore have the greatest influence and power, owe to everyone else a higher share of their wealth going into maintaining keeping the nation strong.The wealthy CEOs of profit and non-profit organizations and government agencies, the inheritors of great wealth, the people who were fortunate enough to combine their native skills with the luck of support, being in the right place at the right time, etc., for their net worth and income to grow from middle class to wealthy, also frequently enjoy benefits exponentially greater than middle class. Therefore they owe to the larger nation a share of their wealth that matches the benefits they enjoy.

Is how poor a use of downtown land this is. The FAR for this property is 2. IOW, if the whole site was covered, it would be a two-story building. In Downtown Boston! (The Federal Reserve building isn't much better, but at least 4.5, the Hancock—or whatever we're not calling it now—is 25; see here.)

While I don't mind this sort of brutalist architecture, I do mind a suburban office park taking up this land downtown. Given property values, the state and the Feds should do what Uncle did with Volpe over in Cambridge: sell off the property to the highest bidder and get them to build you a new (and more dense) office building. If you want it to be brutalist, fine.

No one wants to hang out in an ugly expanse of fake stone (except for I guess skateboarders!) Concrete is not what makes people feel comfortable and welcome.