suburbs. Modern architecture would make a concrete statement that Boston was a forward-looking city on the move.

The symbolic centerpiece was to be a new city hall. A 1962 design competition produced what many hailed as a masterpiece of the Brutalist style: a weighty modern complex resembling a castle in unfinished concrete and glass, completed in 1968, which joins the brick field of City Hall Plaza to historic Faneuil Hall. Boston City Hall architects Gerhard Kallmann, Michael McKinnell and Edward F. Knowles aimed to address the relationship between “the order of government and the unstructured vitality of the public streets,” they later wrote. Its processional stairways and ceremonial spaces speak with an architectural grammar of both grandeur and openness. The building “represents a very important phase in Boston history,” says Hubert Murray. “It embodies a spirit in which there is faith in the public realm.” A 1976 American Institute of Architects poll of historians and architects identified the structure as the sixth greatest building in American history.

But as ArchitectureBoston editor Elizabeth S. Padjen pointed out in a 2005 roundtable on the building’s future, Boston City Hall “has been one of the most polarizing structures in the city.” Bostonians have long disagreed on its aesthetic appeal; for many, raw concrete is an inherently ugly material. In addition, ever since pedestrian walkways through the building were closed for security reasons, City Hall has seemed far less accessible than intended. Current mayor Thomas Menino has suggested selling it to finance a new city