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Brookline Village gets its answer to Boston City Hall

So how about that giant cube now rising on Harvard Street?

... The cube itself is a monolithic presence, kind of like a big stereo speaker in a room of antique furniture, as we look across the street to the fine historic red brick buildings, with their inviting doors and windows, fine detailing and timeless simplicity. It would have been entirely possible to design a modern structure that nonetheless fit in this setting. Had it had some elements remotely in common with the structures in the vicinity, namely the original church, the house on Holden, or the brick buildings on Harvard, be it materials, height, massing, roof height and angle, the rhythm of windows, shape, form, etc. But these structures have none of these. ...

Via Neal Simpson.

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Comments

I thought Brookline's answer to Boston's hideous City Hall was Brookline's hideous Town Hall -- a big concrete cube with windows, which only looks worse in comparison when you see the beautiful library it is adjacent to.

The church's stupid cube is also very bad, but I'd say it is a different sort of bad. It reminds me more of the horrible new addition to the MFA, but with concrete instead of glass.

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I could not even read the article after running into two uses of it's when the blogger meant its.

Is it like really hard or something to get the two straight?

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You might be able to salvage it. Glue on some faux red brick panels and some white clapboard. Then obscure it with trees and staple up some ivy.

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i actually think it is elegant, well scaled, and beautiful. So what if its not red brick?

As the america's "history" city Boston should be taking cues from asian and european cities that have evolved a mature appreciation short of reverence for their own historical setting, not the petty knee-jerk overprotectionism of other newer american cities.

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