When Boston City Hall opened in 1968, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable praised its plaza as “one of the best urban spaces of the 20th Century,” noting that it was inspired by the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy.
Huxtable was in the minority. Even architects who admired the Corbusian brutalism of City Hall—which, like the plaza, was designed by Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles—criticized the seven-acre treeless expanse as out of scale, windswept, and devoid of civic virtue. This has been pretty much the consensus for the past half century, but now Boston is finally doing something about it. On Tuesday, Mayor Martin J. Walsh unveiled a scheme by local firm Sasaki that will transform the plaza into a “welcoming front yard for civic life.”
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