Höweler + Yoon on Boston City Hall 2.0
Some of you ninjas may remember the posts we had up a few months back featuring Boston’s City Hall – and the exhibition at Pink Comma of the ‘alternative’ schemes that had recently been presented in Architecture Boston. One such proposal [or, two+, really] was designed by our current architecte de la semaine, Höweler + Yoon Architecture.
In an attempt to address all the issues with the building, the architects considered all of the basic solutions in the image above – and for the proposal featured here seem to have combined ‘shrink it‘, ‘enter it‘ and ‘mask it‘. The proposal, ‘Wrap’, creates a new ground plane that rises up to the building and – as the name suggests – wraps around it, creating a second skin for the building.
Basically, the proposal is an attempt to make the City Hall more ‘people friendly’ – allowing for more pedestrian/public interaction with the brutalist structure. Who would’ve thought – a city hall/city hall plaza that’s people friendly, and doesn’t look like the embodiment of some kind of unapproachable totalitarian structure…Seriously though, I’m not sure that the proposal is totally based in reality [in terms of something like this ever getting built in Boston], but it’s still one of many favorite proposals.
[There would be some kind of auditorium/gathering space in that glass area beneath the ramp…pretty siiick]
You can check out more of the proposals for ‘Rethinking Boston City Hall’ in the issue of Architecture Boston – or if you’re in the are you can check out the exhibit [previously over at Pink Comma] at Wentworth.
Previous posts on Höweler + Yoon on architecture.MNP:
ADLS 18.02.2008: Höweler + Yoon
Other posts on Boston’s City Hall on architecture.MNP:
over,under on Boston City Hall
::Images + info from Höweler + Yoon Architecture website::
Posted: February 25th, 2008
at 10:54pm by orangemenace
Categories: architecture,green arch,featured ninjas,architecte de la semaine
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