Boson's Proposed 1960's I.M. Pei City Hall Design - Echoed Boston City Hall Across the River - Unbuilt and Unloved
When Massachusetts was trying to modernize tired old cities with vanished industries and seemingly a bleak future in the 1960's some turned to clearing parts of a downtown area and building a completely new complex of buildings and public space. The City of Boston left behind a cramped old Mansard building of slolid stone and built a brand new city hall with lots of cement. Boson wanted to do the same and hired I. M. Pei (貝聿銘) as the architect to design the building. Pei was very expensive. Boson wanted to echo the feel of the bigger sister city across Boston Harbor. The resulting design was deemed ugly and even creepy by the design committee in Boson. The amount spent on the design and committee members expenses consumed all the money allocated for the new Boson City Hall, so the building was never built.
Across the river in Boston things were did not go well for the ugly duckling 1960's city hall. This project constituted a major urban redesign effort in the 1960s, as Boston demolished an area of substandard housing and pushed out substandard people from what was once 'The West End' of Boston. The new Boston City Hall has been subject to nearly universal public condemnation, and is often called one of the world's ugliest buildings. Calls for the structure to be demolished have been regularly made even before construction was finished. Bizarrely architects and elite critics considered it to be excellent work, with one poll finding that professional architects describe Boston City Hall as one of the ten proudest achievements of American architecture.
Others think that Boson dodged a bullet.
Boson's Old City Hall - Built 1870
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