Boston City Hall and Mitchell/Giurgola Architects: Thoughts and Themes on a Competition’s “Runner-Up”

Abstract

Analysis of the unofficial runner-up in the 1961–62 design competition for Boston City Hall—the scheme by the Philadelphia-based team of Mitchell/Giurgola Architects (MGA) in association with David A. Crane and Thomas R. Vreeland Jr.—reveals not the creation of an isolated monument but a humanist restructuring of a city’s urban spaces at the heart of a modernist-inspired post-war government centre. Unusually for the time, this scheme was developed through deep dialogue with an existing urban morphology, historic buildings, and the literal “ground” of the city. This paper highlights the scheme as the first in a series of significant urban design projects undertaken by MGA in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. These projects sought to directly engage with the structure, spaces, and artefacts of the historic American city. Further, MGA’s City Hall also crystallised compositional themes that would be pursued and developed by the practice in subsequent decades.

Keywords:

• Architectural competitions
• Boston City Hall
• Mitchell/Giurgola
• Romaldo Giurgola
• urban design

Introduction

Gerhard Kallmann and N. Michael McKinnell’s Boston City Hall (1962–68) is one of the most celebrated pieces of late modern architecture in the United States. But it was and has also been—at a local level—across more than fifty years, one of the most reviled pieces of post-war urban development.¹ This paper does not attempt to adjudicate that debate nor understand City Hall’s changing reputation and reception as this has been done extensively elsewhere.² Instead, through an analysis of competition drawings held by the University of Pennsylvania, contemporary and secondary sources, this paper considers what might have been by examining what came to be widely regarded as the unofficial runner-up in the 1961–62 international design competition for Boston City Hall: the scheme by the Philadelphia-based team of Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane and Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Intrinsic to that design—led by Romaldo Giurgola—was not the creation of an isolated monument but the restructuring of a city’s urban spaces at the symbolic heart of an entirely new modernist-inspired post-war government centre. Unusually for the time, this was planned to be realised through a deep dialogue with an existing urban morphology, key historic buildings, and the literal “ground” of the city (fig. 1).

Figure 1. View from southeast, Boston City Hall, competition, stage II, 1962, architects Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane & Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 267), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

The reasons for the fresh re-examination of an unbuilt scheme are threefold. First, the Boston City Hall scheme was the first in a series of significant urban projects in the United States by Mitchell/Giurgola Architects (MGA) in the 1960s and 1970s, which, unusually, sought to directly and conscientiously engage with the structure, spaces, and artefacts of the historic American city. Second, the scheme is the first time in which a series of diverse but specific compositional themes are coherently revealed in MGA’s work. These themes would persist in the firm’s work over the next twenty years, distinguish the firm’s work from that of Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and reach—arguably—their apotheosis in the 1979 design of the Australian Parliament House in Canberra, completed in 1988. Third, it will be argued that through this examination, the MGA design for Boston City Hall has deserved its consistent acclamation over the decades and further, deserves greater recognition for its direct challenge in 1962 to commonly held precepts in urban design at that time.

The impact of competitions on architectural design culture is not always about “winners.” There are occasions where some entries become more renowned, even notorious, in contrast to the judges’ final choice.³ In the Chicago Tribune Tower competition of 1922, for example, unsuccessful entries by Adolf Loos; Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer; and Bruno Taut, Walter Günther, and Kurz Schutz amongst others became canonical works through the largely modernist lens of most accounts of twentieth-century architecture. The winning entry by Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, built and completed as a soaring gothic skyscraper in 1925, was, for years, relegated to a lesser position within the historical canon. Even at the time of the competition and for years immediately afterward, Eliel Saarinen’s second place entry earned, as Katherine Solomonson has documented, significant discussion and praise in the local, professional, and academic press.⁴ Its unadorned, vertically stepping form was seen as an influential harbinger of skyscrapers to come. Solomonson records that in 1932, Alfred Granger, the only architect on the competition jury, declared publicly in the Chicago Tribune “that Saarinen’s competition entry had had more influence on American architecture than any other building.”⁵ Herein lies another reason to examine MGA’s unsuccessful entry in the Boston City Hall competition.

Instead of claiming retrospective influence on American architecture, this paper proposes that MGA’s entry and hence the Boston City Hall competition itself should be read as significant within the context of a newly emergent and developing discourse on urban design in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the time of the announcement of the competition in late 1961, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had become central nodes on new debates on urban design. In 1960, Kevin Lynch (with substantial input from MIT colleague Gyorgy Kepes) published The Image of the City, with its focus on “imageability” and a cityscape’s “legibility.”⁶ His five identified elements of paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks that gave a city its “legibility” were based on a five-year study of Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles. The book had been written with the “conviction that analysis of existing form and its effect on the citizen is one of the foundation stones of city design.”⁷ However, in the book’s closing case study, Lynch compared Boston’s Beacon Hill neighbourhood with that of Scollay Square, where City Hall would eventually rise. He described Scollay Square as “physically inchoate,” as needing “visual identity” and that “it could play an even more striking visual role as the central point of the old head of the Boston peninsula, the hub of a whole series of districts.”⁸ It was an ominous forewarning and, at the same time, an unspoken condoning of Boston’s larger and ongoing project of urban renewal.

Earlier, in 1956, Dean José Luis Sert convened the first international conference at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where the term, “urban design” came to be defined by him as “that part of city planning which deals with the physical form of the city,” where “city planners, landscape architects, and architects can only be part of a larger team of specialists required to solve urban design problems.”⁹ By April 1961, Harvard’s Fifth Urban Design Conference was centred around the theme of “The Institution as a Generator of Urban Form.”¹⁰ Five institutional themes, each paired with a case study, were selected as the focus for the conference: government (Detroit Civic Complex); education (the Charles River universities, for instance, of Harvard and MIT); health (Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago); culture (Lincoln Centre, New York); and research (Salk Institute, San Diego). Of the Detroit Civic Complex, master-planned in 1945 by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, criticism was uniformly negative, especially of the vast open spaces between buildings.¹¹ In the open discussion, planning administrator Don Graham of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was recorded as saying:

The question of buildings and open space has also been troubling Boston. In Boston we are talking about a million square feet for the Federal Building alone. If you put blocks down on a model you tend to end up with a space which looks better on the model than it does on the ground. One suggestion is that we should not try to think in terms of a formal plaza but of an informal common: not to try and think of a lot of activity that can make a focal space but simply make a pleasant relaxing place for workers in the buildings around: in effect abandon the idea of making this space a center of activity.¹²

It was clear that even within the context of the rise of an urban design consciousness in the United States, cultural changes within the planning and design profession itself were slow and gradual. MGA’s competition entry thus needs to be understood as sitting within an existing context of a gap between a developing academic and theoretical discourse centred on the new concept of “urban design” and the realities of actual physical master plans developed on the basis of “urban renewal” and proceeding to implementation under the wishes of city administrators and the broader business community. Under the mayoralty (1960–67) of John F. Collins and urban planner Edward J Logue’s administration of the BRA (1960–67), Boston’s historic urban peninsula was radically transformed. A long-term project of comprehensive urban renewal, which had begun formally with the release in 1951 of Boston’s City Planning Board’s A General Plan for Boston: A Preliminary Report (1950) was realised over next seventeen years.¹³ The General Plan advocated the removal of “urban blight” and “obsolete neighbourhoods,” which in some cases, meant wholesale replacement. Over the next ten years, much of that was achieved through successive master plans, empirical surveys based on Federal Housing Acts related to health, subsequent and substantial fiscal support from the federal government, and the force of eminent domain (legal compulsory land acquisition by government).¹⁴ Two of the largest urban renewal demolition projects were the replacement of Scollay Square with a new “Government Center” and the West End with “Charles River Park.” Daniel Abramson has written of Boston’s West End, where, by 1962, demolition of the entire neighbourhood was complete with the displacement of some two thousand families.¹⁵ Abramson’s depiction of post-war Boston found parallel in urban areas across the United States in the post-war decades:

Conceptualizing the problem of America’s urban areas as obsolescence would thus have made strong sense to business interests. The law’s inclusion of blight framed America’s urban ills as economic, curable by an architectural version of Joseph Schumpteter’s “Creative Destruction,” the new superseding the old. Invoking obsolescence, in law and discourse, arguably helped render post-war federal urban renewal legislation palatable to businessmen who would otherwise be antipathetic to government social programs. … Obsolescence in 1950s America offered a mutually agreeable framework for managing change in the built environment.¹⁶

As Alex Kreiger has written, urban renewal in Boston would see Scollay Square and its neighbourhood removed and replaced by a new “Government Center” that included a new City Hall. It would “herald the re-emergence of the ‘Cradle of Liberty’ as a vital modern city.”¹⁷

Focus on Context: the Competition Brief

On October 16, 1961, Boston’s Government Center Commission released the brief for the nation-wide two-stage competition to select an architect for a new City Hall in the City of Boston’s new Government Center. The jury for the competition’s preliminary stage comprised local civic leader and businessman Harold Hodgkinson, Chairman of the Board of William Filene’s Sons and four well-known architects: Pietro Belluschi, Walter A. Netsch, Ralph Rapson and William W. Wurster (the jury chair).¹⁸ For Stage II, where entries were whittled down to an allowable maximum of eight shortlisted entries,¹⁹ added to the jury were a further two Boston businessmen: O. Kelley Anderson, President of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company, Boston and Sidney R. Rabb, Chairman of the Board of Stop and Shop, Boston.²⁰

Professional adviser and author of the competition brief was Lawrence B. Anderson, Chair of MIT’s Architecture Department. Anderson’s brief is important for its direct encouragement to entrants to focus on Boston’s character and history. His detailed program included material on the site’s indigenous first inhabitants, geography, climate, urban and architectural history. It made special reference to the “dark, rich reds” of Boston’s New England waterstruck bricks and also the widespread use of granite by architects from H.H. Richardson to Marcel Breuer, on historic structures like Quincy Market and Customs House, and for paving blocks “produced and laid by the millions,” and as the “material of choice for street and highway curbing.”²¹ In short, Anderson made strong and deliberate suggestions as to material choice for the new City Hall. He also noted the current, granite-clad City Hall (1862–65) at School and Province Streets, designed by G.J.F. Bryant and Arthur Gilman, and one of the United States’ first examples of the French Second Empire style, and the Annex (1912), the eleven storey “neo-classic slab” added to the north. Mention too was made of buildings—“national shrines”—that lay outside the “project area” such as the Old State House (1713), Faneuil Hall (1742) and Quincy Market (1824–26). Yet, Anderson stated these “are an inseparable part of the design ensemble” and that the four-kilometre-long Freedom Trail, conceived in 1951 and marked in red brick, would connect these points with other heritage landmarks and traverse the southeast corner of the project.²² Implicit was the suggestion that the new City Hall and its attendant public spaces should not just reinvigorate a run-down and seedy section of the city and perform an act of urban renewal, but also complement and enrich the pedestrian experience of historic Boston.

Significantly, and in contra-distinction to Anderson’s directives to respect urban context, all competitors had to simultaneously take account of I.M. Pei and Associates’ 1961 master-plan. Pei’s plan forecast with modernist clarity the surgical removal of more than thirty city blocks and dozens of streets and laneways in favour of a much-reduced series of buildings and urban spaces of substantially increased footprint and height as well as a vast public pedestrian plaza. The centre of this plaza was to be occupied by a new City Hall that formed at its south-eastern corner a more orthodox, even intimate, urban ensemble with Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. City Hall was intended to be the defining centrepiece of the vast urban renewal project for Boston’s new Government Center that would see Dock Square and Scollay Square (which had a “long reputation as the place where inelegant transients come to enjoy themselves”²³) redeveloped as a series of public and office buildings centred around a vast expanse of car-free pedestrian open spaces. From 1956, the Boston City Planning Board had advocated this area for redevelopment, established the Government Center Commission in 1958, and following the creation of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), commissioned I.M. Pei & Associates to undertake their master plan. In all respects, Pei’s suggested siting and formal dimensions for a new City Hall in height and width strictly controlled competitors’ responses to the competition brief. This included the building’s east façade forming a visual closure to Dock Square and the south façade doing the same for the termination of Washington Street.²⁴

Competitors were also asked to propose a surface treatment for the open space around the building and Anderson reminded competitors that the BRA was planning to restore the ground level of Dock Square to its original granite block paving.²⁵ In a section titled “Civic Design,” Anderson also warned against the provision of too large an open space, stating that the eventual architects would “have the honour of expanding upon a theme of urban design laid out long ago by Bulfinch and Parris.”²⁶ Anderson recommended that entrants strive to achieve an appropriate intensity of scale and quality that respected historic fabric and that the spaces around the building and across the site generally would be entirely for pedestrians. In short, Anderson’s brief was fully cognisant of the importance of views experienced at ground level, the shaping of spaces between City Hall and other buildings. The treatment of the “floor of these exterior spaces, and the arrangement of architectural and landscape elements therein, are basic to the design of City Hall and to the full realisation of the civic design intention embodied in the BRA’s overall vision for the Government Center.”²⁷

A Winner and a “Runner-up”

On January 17, 1962, 256 entries were received by the preliminary stage deadline of the competition. A shortlist of eight relatively young and unknown architects was selected, and Stage II designs were prepared, including a model that could be placed within a larger model (provided to the jury by the Commission) showing surrounding buildings. These were submitted on April 25, 1962. All drawings were to be mounted on stiff white boards and no colour was permitted though any non-smudging black, grey or white medium could be used—a requirement that ensured visual parity but could potentially work against Anderson’s contextual recommendations on colour and materiality. A winner was publicly declared on May 4, 1962.

At the end of the competition process, the jury wrote to Anderson commending the winning entry by Kallmann and McKinnell, which they had settled upon unanimously. They argued that the Corbusian-inspired concrete design would be “a keystone between the historic past and the brilliant new future which is to come. It takes thoughtful recognition of Faneuil Hall, Dock Square and Quincy Market and yet it is a powerful design in its own right.” They further added that it was “a daring, yet classical architectural statement, contained within a vigorous unified form.”²⁸ At the same time, notably, the jury made no mention of whether the winning entry inserted itself—successfully or otherwise—within an existing urban context. This was despite the stated competition requirement for a solution that would meet one of the criteria that the winning design relate in scale and character to the surrounding buildings and spaces.

When the competition and its winning entry were reviewed by Progressive Architecture in April 1963, the prize-winning entry was separately critiqued in the same issue by Peter Collins, then Professor of Architecture at McGill University and author of Concrete: The New Vision of a New Architecture (1959).²⁹ Only one of the seven non-premiated entries was featured by Progressive Architecture alongside the Kallmann and McKinnell entry. It was what came to be regarded as the unofficial runner-up in the competition: the entry by the team comprising the Philadelphia-based firm of Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane and Thomas R. Vreeland Jr., both architect-colleagues of Romaldo (Aldo) Giurgola (1920–2016) at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1989, Hélène Lipstadt provided a more detailed list of the personnel involved in the entry. She noted other team members as being Ian McHarg, landscape architect and Penn colleague; Robert Kliment, a Yale graduate (1959) recently returned from a Fulbright Fellowship (1959–60) to study the history and evolution of urban spaces in Italy; Fred Foote, then an MArch student at Penn; and Rollin LaFrance, Andre Gineste, Clifford Slavin and Luis Zilla, all then employed in the MGA office.³⁰

The inclusion of the Giurgola design alongside the winning entry was significant. It appears to have been deliberately provocative. The managing editor of Progressive Architecture at the time was Polish-born, Architectural Association and McGill University-trained architect Jan C. Rowan (1924–85), who had published two years before in April 1961 what was to become the seminal article “Wanting to Be: The Philadelphia School.”³¹ In April 1963, Rowan would have been pleased to anoint the Giurgola design as “Runner-Up.”³² There was no official second-placed entry. But for Rowan to explain and elaborate upon the MGA design and deliberately place it alongside the winning scheme was a way of vindicating the prophecy of influence that he had set in place two years before.

Open and Accessible

The MGA team’s design was one of two of the eight shortlisted entries that did not keep to the strict prismatic outline dictated by IM Pei’s 1961 masterplan (fig. 2).³³ Instead, it physically separated the civic and symbolic functions of city hall from its everyday bureaucratic functions as a way of engaging with the broader urban morphology of the surrounding area. The scheme comprised three tall office slabs arranged around a square courtyard and an attached, lower building containing the council chamber, mayor’s office, and a municipal reference library. All four buildings sat on massive, widely spaced supports that contained elevators or stairs (fig. 3). Conceptually, the entire ground plane was open and accessible. It was a truly public space, an urban landscape through which the public could pass unobstructed. At the same time, given the changes in level across the site and Boston’s unforgiving climate, this degree of conceptual openness required some level of practical adjustment.

Figure 2. Final model, Boston City Hall, competition, stage II, 1962, architects Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane & Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Boston City Archives.

Figure 3. Ground level plan, Boston City Hall, competition, stage II, 1962, architects Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane & Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 267), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

The undercroft of the attached, lower building was completely open. It resembled a broletto, a medieval Italian town hall type that had an open ground floor behind arcades and a large meeting room above. In Como’s Palazzo del Broletto (1215), for example, the ground plane served as an extension of the marketplace in front and behind the building. Above was the town hall and law court. In the MGA design, this same spatial connection with a broader urban plaza was adopted. But at the centre of the undercroft, eight blade columns defined a square-planned, well-like volume above that rose four levels to the underside of council chamber, which was held aloft like a jewel in a crown.

By contrast, the ground levels of the three tall office slabs on their outer perimeter were fully glazed over two levels. Members of the public could thus enter from three sides into a continuous double-height volume that wrapped around a central square courtyard. Also wrapping around but within this interior volume was a line of continuous customer service counters with open-plan office spaces behind. This was an extraordinary gesture. It represented a completely transparent engagement with the public. Customer service personnel were fully exposed to the community (fig. 4). This was to be municipal bureaucracy at its most open and accessible. The only interruptions within this encircling public volume were pedestrian bridges and zig-zagging escalators to other municipal services on the upper floors. At the centre of this composition externally was a square open to the sky that resembled a Renaissance cortile. Below its granite paving were two levels of “data processing” (fig. 5). Buried at the very heart of this open, public building were the people’s records. The potent symbolism of this volumetric and planimetric arrangement of municipal democracy was obvious. Giurgola and his team were reaching back to time-honoured origins of democratic assembly (within the Italian medieval setting) and then transposing them onto a contemporary context that was modern Boston.

Figure 4. View of main lobby area, Boston City Hall, competition, stage II, 1962, architects Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane & Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 267), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

Figure 5. East–west sections, Boston City Hall, competition, stage II, 1962, architects Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane and Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 267), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

Articulate Structure

At the same time, MGA’s City Hall design demonstrated an abiding interest in the expressive and structural capacity of exposed reinforced concrete. Visual and symbolic purpose were combined with the engineering ability of reinforced concrete to span great distances and create large-scale, column-free honorific volumes. It was a strategy that, in this paper, is termed and described as “articulate structure” and which was brought into the service of complementing the firm’s urban strategies. As with MGA’s use of form to contextually address the city, articulate structure might also do the same. It might also address landscape. MGA’s interest in articulate structure—structure that might speak—had already been demonstrated in the design for the Wright Brothers Memorial Visitors Centre at Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina (1960). There, a thin shell concrete dome spanning forty feet (12.2 metres) was matched externally with opposing thin shell overhangs, not just to provide and light a large central display space but also to visually signal the building in its near-flat dune landscape.³⁴

For Boston City Hall, MGA also used reinforced concrete as “articulate structure.” The lower four floors of each building of the complex—above the democratic ground plane—stepped inward from the surrounding plaza. This was made possible by superimposed floor-high three-dimensional trusses. Externally, these exposed concrete hollow tetrahedral trusses also distinguished the heavily trafficked publicly accessible floors close to the ground from the more remote upper office floors. On the courtyard side, the trusses were reversed so that each successive floor stepped back from the courtyard. The concrete tetrahedral trusses were now not hollow but skeletal and lay behind glass. All four faces (sloping and vertical) of the buildings surrounding the courtyard were to be sheathed in heat and glare resistant bronze-framed glass. It was a completely different treatment from the heavily modelled “external” face to the city (fig. 6). Instead, MGA provided a new hollowed-out urban volume—one whose lining was crisply defined as curtain-walled glass—a strategy later employed in the firm’s ill-fated schemes for the AIA Headquarters in Washington DC (1965, 1967, discussed by Catherine Lassen and Cameron Logan in this same issue). Significantly this design tactic predated James Stirling’s celebrated canted glazed walls and red brick “bookends” of the History Faculty Library at the University of Cambridge (1963–68) and Florey Building at Oxford University (1966–71).³⁵

Figure 6. North–south sections, Boston City Hall, competition, stage II, 1962, architects Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane and Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 267), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

Facing the city and above the trussed floors of the three office slabs forming the square courtyard was a hollow reinforced concrete screen wall clad in red brick. The screen, supported by the trussed floors beneath, contained ductwork and rose over five levels. It masked and was independent from the conventional floor-to-ceiling glazing of the offices behind. Giant twenty-foot (six-metre) square openings cut into this red-brick screen admitted light to these offices (fig. 7). The screen also acted as a giant brise-soleil. This was the first time that MGA had used this compositional strategy of a mask-like screen/brise-soleil. It was a strategy that may have inspired Kahn’s treatment of the crown of the services tower of the Goddard annex (1965) of the Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania (1957–65).³⁶

Figure 7. East Elevation, Boston City Hall, competition, stage II, 1962, architects Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane & Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 267), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

In 1989, Joseph Rykwert would remark upon and identify this device as a defining MGA motif.³⁷ Elsewhere, red brick was carried down as a “revetment” to sheath the lift and stair towers as well as the 45° angled wall of the campanile-like blade tower that invited pedestrians into the building’s central square courtyard.³⁸ Completing this monumental red brick armature, the red-brick screen continued vertically with a further series of punched square openings: another mask but this time to the elevator overruns and roof-top air-conditioning plant. This was the first time that MGA used what would become another signature aspect of its later practice: a compositional tactic of cardboard-like cut-outs, where brick or red terracotta tile facing was used in a graphic manner, emphasising brick as a skin and not as Kahn might want the brick to be: a marker of mass and the hand.

MGA’s “articulate structure” was also practical. The tetrahedral trusses on the building’s edges provided support for long-span reinforced concrete T-beams that in turn provided column-free office space within. It was a completely integrated system. Also involving the concept of articulate structure was the housing of the council chamber. A self-supporting system of eight blade columns rose through the open volume in the centre of the lower council building and supported the council chamber on an independent platform of concrete T-beams. A skylight defined the edge of the square planned volume allowing light to spill into the open well beneath. The chamber appeared to rise free of its surrounding structure. The chamber itself was surmounted by an exposed reinforced concrete lantern formed by the meeting of a cruciform of angled blade supports that rose even higher to a cruciform-shaped light monitor. This elaborate concrete form identified the chamber externally and would have become an important visual focal point—a landmark—not just for the whole building composition, but also, for pedestrians, as a visual connection between Quincy Market, Faneuil Hall, the Samuel Adams statue, and as one crossed the plaza to join the Freedom Trail and turned towards the Old State House. The chamber’s lantern was also an abstract echo of Old City Hall’s eagle-topped mansard tower roof. As an emblem formed from four angled supports, MGA’s lantern would find further echo seventeen years later in the massive cruciform supports for the flagpole of Mitchell Giurgola Thorp’s Australian Parliament House (1979–88). The honorific nature of the interior volume of the council chamber also forecast a focus on similarly treated volumes in educational, sacred, and institutional spaces in later MGA projects.³⁹

The Order of the City

The distinguishing aspect and overriding strength of the MGA entry was its approach to urban design. This quality was evidenced in a deep engagement with existing historic buildings, their scale, height, bulk, and materiality—at ground, mid-level, and skyline. The inclusion of new buildings were intended to create human-centred places in their own right and strengthen existing pedestrian connections, making sense of a broader urban landscape that Giurgola would later describe as “the order of the city.”⁴⁰ This would become another defining feature of MGA’s practice for the next three decades. In massing terms, the MGA design responded not just to the scale of the nearby historic buildings, but also to the neighbouring tall buildings, existing and soon to be built, such as The Architects Collaborative’s 26-floor John F. Kennedy Building (1963–66), which would front the northwest corner of the vast urban plaza that contained City Hall. The MGA design acknowledged and mediated both scales: big and small. Stage I competition drawings show their City Hall design to be carefully calibrated against the heights of both historic and future city (fig. 8). The council chamber, for example, matched exactly the height of Faneuil Hall. A text appended to the elevation from Dock Square indicates their design intent:

Figure 8. Elevation from Dock Square, Boston City Hall, competition, stage I, 1961, architects Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane & Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 267), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

A summation of parts focussed around the City Council Chamber.

Placed on the gap, between the new square and the terrace facing Faneuil Hall.

The lowest but the richest part of the building, born from the characteristics of the topography.

A deep and receptive end to Washington Street, a structure open to resolve the outside space within itself, its courts, and vestibules.⁴¹

Across all Giurgola’s evocative perspective drawings, the inclusion of people occupying and traversing the “topography” of the ground plane paired with the softly textured rendering of materials reinforce the scheme’s humanism. It is as if the MGA design is not an end in itself but suggests its role as gracefully complementing the city’s existing experiential life. This position—arguably anti-modernist in intent—can also be seen in the Stage II redrawing of the aerial photograph supplied in the competition brief. The insertion of City Hall as part of an entirely new sequence of monumental sites and urban spaces pays tribute to the urban morphology of historic Boston (figs 9 and 10).⁴² Here Giurgola and his team allude directly to Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome. They celebrate the American city as having its own venerable history rather than depict its modernist reconditioning.

Figure 9. Aerial photograph provided in A Competition to Select an Architect for the New City Hall in the Government Center of the City of Boston, competition brief, 1961. Source: Boston City Library.

Figure 10. Site plan, Boston City Hall, competition, stage II, 1962, architects Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane & Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 267), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

At the time, competition team members Romaldo Giurgola, Thomas R. Vreeland Jr., David A. Crane, and Ian McHarg were all teaching in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, alongside colleagues Edmund Bacon, Robert Geddes, Louis I. Kahn, and G. Holmes Perkins, amongst others. All were deeply involved in their teaching and professional practice in questions of the city and its architectures, planning and landscapes.⁴³ Crane, for example, had already published articles on “The City Symbolic,” “Chandigarh Rediscovered,” developed an urban design theory that he termed the “capital web,” and in 1964 wrote “The Public Art of City Building.”⁴⁴ He would shortly go onto to become Director of Land Planning and Design at the BRA.

Similarly, Giurgola was teaching the history and theory of architecture and civic design, and in November 1962 (after the competition winner had been announced), the seminar paper he delivered to the AIA-ACSA meeting at Cranbrook argued for a more informed understanding of urbanism. He gave the example of historic Europe, “in which the new was added to the old according to a process of integration and absorption which almost never led to the total destruction of what existed.”⁴⁵ He spoke also of Boston’s Government Center which “presented a considerable problem because of the sudden arrest of the old structures severed with surgical precision to obtain space for the new buildings.” He concluded:

The representation of the city is of an artistic order; there is no one method for the construction of the city; and the interior spaces determine the form of the city …. Our unchanging task then is to seek the relation between the historic-social-economic situation and the city as esthetic construction.⁴⁶

These ideas linked back to the writings of Camillo Sitte, Giurgola’s education at the University of Rome under Gustavo Giovannoni, an influential proponent of working with and conserving the historic city,⁴⁷ and also to his time as a graduate student at Columbia University (1949–51), completing his MArch thesis under urban theorist and architect Percival Goodman, co-author of Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (1947, rev. edn 1960). Goodman’s book, or primer, was idiosyncratic and Giurgola might only have appreciated it for its discussion of Sitte and the piazza.⁴⁸ These seemingly disparate but connected influences were different to the certainties of tabula rasa modernism. Importantly, they were also different to Paul Rudolph’s hermetically delivered, self-contained “scenographic urbanism” at the Boston Government Service Center (1962–71).⁴⁹ Giurgola was interested and alive to the contingencies of the existing city as a necessary and potentially productive reality in the face of rampant urban renewal. In 1965, he would crystallise these ideas in Perspecta, arguing for “Reflections on Buildings and the City: The Realism of the Partial Vision.” There he stated that older cities “are places made of a succession of ‘conscious presences’ rather than of efforts toward totality.” For him, organising principles in urban design should be “hidden in an apparently spontaneous growth” and that when a single structure is introduced into an urban context, “a complexity of partial visions is sought rather than a fixed image of the totality of an urban environment.”⁵⁰ This was the intention behind MGA’s Boston City Hall competition entry of 1961–62. Its design embodied a series of guiding principles that Giurgola through MGA would pursue for the rest of his career.

The MGA design for Boston City Hall demonstrates another, undiscussed design approach that can be attributed to Giurgola’s drawing techniques: his predilection—in conceptual drawings—for the longitudinal landscape/urban section, where he is able to walk the “ground” of the city/landscape and delineate its undulations, “walls,” “volumes,” spatial pauses, and landmarks, and propose new iterations. In such sectional drawings it is as if Giurgola is imagining himself as the pedestrian; forecasting experiences that are then supplemented and complemented by his better known, career-defining, perspective drawings. Prior to the 1961–62 entry for Boston City Hall, MGA’s other (and only) significant competition entry since the establishment of the firm in 1958 was in 1960 for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial that was planned to be located in West Potomac Park in Washington, DC.⁵¹ Crane was also associated with the competition entry. Gaining an honourable mention, Giurgola’s perspective drawings of a broader memorial landscape experience are dramatic: the design’s central aim was to have visitors walk along a single, straight promenade (70 × 800 feet, or 21 × 244 metres) that bisected a huge square-planned field of wheat and which began and ended with two major water bodies—the Tidal Basin and the Potomac River. But it is in the sectional drawings that one fully understands the subtlety of the scheme: an extremely sophisticated composition of an elevated embankment/bridge with occasional square-shaped seating alcoves for reflection and interpretation that appear to float over sloping flood gardens. What is apparent here is Giurgola’s complete control of the human experience. In Washington, it was the experience of a much larger “capital” or monumental landscape. In Boston, it was the experience of City Hall as just one moment amongst a broader collection of urban elements in the much larger terrain experienced by a walk through the city. Giurgola’s drawings in both competitions (1960 and 1961–62) can be paralleled with the contemporary intentions of Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture (1957) and Gordon Cullen’s Townscape (1961). All signal a moment—globally—in architectural and urban design, where the movement of the human body through the city was recognised as an existential act to be nurtured and celebrated.

Reception and Legacy

So why did the MGA entry not win the competition despite its short-listing and the subsequent evidence of later regard given it? It drew notice nationally at the time through the auspices of Jan Rowan at Progressive Architecture, and consistent critical acclaim afterward by commentators such as Robert Stern in 1969, Kenneth Frampton in 1983, Helene Lipstadt in 1989, and most recently by John Lobell in 2023.⁵² There is no clear answer.

One possible explanation is the precedent three years before of the uncompromising internationalism and urban singularity of Finnish architect Viljo Revell’s winning entry in the 1958 design competition for Toronto City Hall, which had followed hard on the heels of the overtly sculptural solution chosen in 1957 for the Sydney Opera House. Adding further fuel to the preference for a heroic design gesture was the October 1961 symposium on architectural competitions held by the New England Regional Council of the AIA, where speakers included Revell and Toronto’s competition advisor, Eric Arthur.⁵³ George Kapelos has noted that Arthur had earlier been invited to Boston in November 1960 to make an informal presentation on Toronto’s City Hall competition, where Boston’s mayor John F. Collins, members of Government Center Commission of the City of Boston, Boston Society of Architects, and Massachusetts State Association of Architects were present.⁵⁴ In 1963, architect and Government Center Commission member Frank W. Crimp, who was there at the Tavern Club meeting, recalled that he felt sure that Arthur’s presentation caused Collins to approve the competition.⁵⁵

It seems that a similar desire for a grand design statement was also held by the distinguished architect-members of Boston City Hall’s competition jury as they handed down their unanimous decision. Further, as Lisabeth Cohen has written, there were also local economic and political pressures in the conception and implementation of Boston’s Government Center that dictated “a collection of buildings and public spaces designed to convey the confidence and authority of government as the agent of progressive change.”⁵⁶ She quotes MIT’s Albert Bush-Brown describing in the Boston Globe in 1962 Kallmann and McKinnell’s winning design as “nothing but a whole-hearted affirmation of a new time, new social needs and the new technology and new aesthetics to declare faith in the civic instrument of government.”⁵⁷

There may also have been other more practical issues to do with the MGA design itself. The subtlety and experimental nature of the “open” counter at plaza level may have been seen as risky. There was also fact that the MGA scheme did not entirely follow Pei’s master-plan. As Brian Sirman points out, there may have been perceptions at the time that the elevated council chamber, which “separated the legislative branch from the executive and municipal bureaucracy” and was held aloft, was distant from the people.⁵⁸ There might also have been the limits placed on presentation by the competition conditions: no colour was allowed. The “dark, rich reds” of Boston’s historic brick buildings highlighted in Anderson’s competition brief and intrinsic to the contextual strength of the MGA scheme would not have been evident. This would perhaps have given some advantage to the boldly delineated drawings of the grey concrete La Tourette-inspired winner—a complete contrast to the beauty and softness of Giurgola’s perspective drawings.

It might also have been that the scheme’s deliberate integration with the existing city—while directly meeting Anderson’s brief—was too radical a move and not visually ambitious enough for a city, even one as conservative as Boston, intent on the impression of and action on urban renewal. There was also the irony, as Joan Ockman has observed, of the publication in 1961, the same year that the competition was announced, of Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. Through the book’s message, in a short time, “the battle lines over urban renewal were sharply drawn in cities across the country,” where “[l]ate modernism was now seen not just as complicit with the establishment but, in its abstract logic, as homologous with the brutality of urban renewal policy.”⁵⁹

Rowan’s 1963 reasons for his preference for the MGA entry thus bear repeating. In Progressive Architecture, he claimed that their scheme “was the object of controversial debate among jury members” and that “this design has also aroused great interest among the profession at large.”⁶⁰ Yet it is a claim cannot be proven. There is no archival evidence to support it and must be taken as hearsay. Nevertheless, after publishing verbatim excerpts of MGA’s project description submitted to the jury, Rowan then compared Kallmann and McKinnell’s winning design to MGA’s entry. He argued that the MGA scheme was “spatially much less complicated, and is as they wanted it, purposely ‘without romantic configurations or mysteries.” He praised the fact that it “stresses a simple, one-level continuity between plaza and public offices” as opposed to the winning team’s “labyrinthian way.” Rowan also highlighted MGA’s tactical connection with the public:

the other [MGA] has done it as directly as possible—even justifying eighty feet clear spans at ground level, in order to eliminate all possible obstructions and to symbolize in a way the “approachability” of city government.

Rowan then compared the winning team’s strategy of suspending the ceremonial spaces between the massive brick base containing the public offices and the top office floors as opposed to MGA’s setting apart the city council chamber, hence making it externally “easily identifiable” (fig. 11). He also drew attention to the “single monumental structure” of the winning solution as opposed to the Philadelphia team’s “two-part solution.” The latter spoke to multiple scales, nearby historic buildings, and the newer towers behind, including the “exaggerated openings” of the brick screen that “attempt to establish rapport with the overwhelming scale of Federal buildings nearby.”⁶¹ Rowan’s analysis of the MGA design is convincing and, at the same time, balanced. He expressed concerns:

Figure 11. View from southwest, Boston City Hall, competition, stage II, 1962: architects: Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane & Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 267), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

This solution may lack the unified organization of the first design, and indeed does fall short in some aspects of interior circulation, relationship of functions, co-ordination of mechanical services and structure, and such design details as the uneasy suspension of a massive brick wall and the proportioning of its openings.⁶²

This may have been so and these aspects may have swayed the jury in its deliberations. However, in all other respects, Rowan’s bold editorial recognition at the time of the urban design strengths of the MGA scheme and its repeated mentions since hints at its prescience. It signals clear evidence of the strength and validity of the urban design thinking from the so-called Philadelphia School and its recognition of the validity of the historic American city as a creative canvas.⁶³ This was a concept not yet fully understood by institutional agencies and even architect-jurors like Belluschi and Wurster who, one might have assumed, would have been sympathetic to the humanist design intentions lying behind the MGA entry. Not so. Sixty years on, Jan Rowan’s 1963 concluding remark regarding the MGA design bears repeating:

No-one can deny, however, that this design team has succeeded as they set out to do, in making their new City Hall “an intimate part of the restructurization of the area, and not an isolated monument.” In this, many believe, the design surpasses the winner.⁶⁴

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant DP220101537: “Locating Giurgola: From Philadelphia School to Global Practice.”

Notes on contributors

Philip Goad

Philip Goad is Chair of Architecture and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne, where he is also Co-Director of the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage (ACAHUCH).

Notes

1 For the past sixty years, Boston City Hall has invited the full spectrum of positive and negative criticism. See for example, Nelson Aldrich and William Stanley Parker, “2 Noted Architects… 2 Views,” Boston Globe, May 6, 1962, 70; “City Hall Plans not for Boston, Graham says,” Boston Globe, May 13, 1962, 40; Henry Millon, “M.I.T. Expert Looks at City Hall Plan: Sees Summer and Winter Beauty, Dignity, Harmony—Should Be Built,” Boston Globe, May 13, 1962, 40; and more recently, Paul McMorrow, “Boston City Hall Should be Torn Down,” Boston Globe, September 24, 2013, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/09/23/boston-city-hall-should-torn-down/oVs2ywpJg1qHZkmmmZIYIL/story.html.

2 For example, see David Monteyne, “Boston City Hall and a History of Reception,” Journal of Architectural Education 65, no. 1 (October 2011): 45–62; Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, and Chris Grimley, “Becoming Heroic,” in Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston, ed. Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, and Chris Grimley (New York: Monacelli Press, 2015), 15–29; and Brian M. Sirman, Concrete Changes: Architecture, Politics and the Design of Boston City Hall (Amherst: Bright Leaf, an imprint of University of Massachusetts Press, 2018).

3 For example, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s entry in the 1926–27 competition for the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva has become much better known in architectural history than the eventual built scheme (1929–38). See Kenneth Frampton, “Le Corbusier at Geneva: The Debacle of the Société des Nations, 1926–1939,” in Architects in Competition: International Architectural Competitions of the last 200 years, ed. Hilde De Haan and Ids Haagsma (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 193–203.

4 Katherine Solomonson, The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 245–47.

5 Solomonson, The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition, 293–94. For Granger’s exact words, see Alfred Granger, “Granger Tells About Tribune Tower Contest: Says Saarinen Has Influenced U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1932, 26.

6 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).

7 Lynch, The Image of the City, 14.

8 Lynch, The Image of the City, 180–81.

9 Jose Luis Sert, “Urban Design: Scope of the Conference,” Progressive Architecture 37, no. 8 (August 1956), 97. Expanded discussion of the First Urban Design Conference at Harvard in 1956, can be found in Eric Mumford, “Urban Design at Harvard, 1953–60,” in Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937–69 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 102–51. See also Richard Marshall, “The Elusiveness of Urban Design: The Perpetual Problem of Definition and Role,” in Urban Design, ed. Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 44–47.

10 See The Institution as a Generator of Urban Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1961).

11 “Report of the Fifth Urban Design Conference, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, April 1961,” Ekistics 12, no. 69 (July 1961), 64–68.

12 Don Graham, quoted in “Report of the Fifth Urban Design Conference, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, April 1961,” Ekistics 12, no. 69 (July 1961), 66.

13 Boston City Planning Board, General Plan for Boston: Preliminary Report (Boston: City of Boston Printing Department, 1950).

14 Alex Krieger, “Misguided Renewal: The Urban Clearance Decades,” in City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 267; see 279–82 for specific reference to Scollay Square and Boston City Hall.

15 Daniel M. Abramson, “Boston’s West End: Urban Obsolescence in Mid-Twentieth Century America,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 47–69.

16 Daniel M. Abramson, “Urban Obsolescence,” Obsolescence: An Architectural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 52–53.

17 Krieger, City on a Hill, 280.

18 William W. Wurster, partner of the San Francisco-based firm of Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons, was Dean of the School of Environmental Design at University of California, Berkeley and former Dean of the School of Architecture at MIT; Walter A. Netsch was a partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and chief designer of the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs; Ralph Rapson was Head of the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota, architect of many US government buildings, and recent competition juror for the new City Hall in Winnipeg, Canada; and Pietro Belluschi, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, was a former member of the National Fine Arts Commission and designer of many distinguished modern structures, including the Equitable Building, Portland (1948).

19 The eight shortlisted entries included: Gerhard Kallmann, N. Michael McKinnell and Edward F. Knowles of New York; F. Frederick Bruck, Ervin Y. Galantay of Cambridge, Mass.; Joseph T. Schiffer of Concord, Mass.; James B. Swack, Wilbert O. Reuter, Lloyd D. Gadau of Appleton, Wisc.; Ehrman B. Mitchell Jr. and Romaldo Giurgola of Philadelphia; W.C. Wong, T.C. Chang, Gertrude Kerbis, Otto Stark and S. Chan Sit of Chicago; Robert Y.S. Hsiung, Ernest V. Johnson, John Ruffing, Waterman, Fuge & Associates Inc. of Cambridge; and Progressive Design Associates, Minnesota (Thomas N. Larson, Peter Woytuk, Thomas C. Van Housen, and George E. Rafferty).

20 Government Center Commission, “Appendix: II Conditions e. Jury,” A Competition to Select an Architect for the New City Hall in the Government Center of the City of Boston (Boston: City of Boston, 1961), ii.

21 Government Center Commission, “I Program 4. Local Materials,” A Competition to Select an Architect for the New City Hall, 5.

22 Government Center Commission, “I Program i. Conservation and Rehabilitation,” A Competition to Select an Architect for the New City Hall, 12. The Freedom Trail, conceived by local journalist William Schofield in 1951, is a pedestrian route through Boston from Boston Common to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown that passes sixteen sites significant to the history of the United States.

23 Government Center Commission, “Appendix: II Conditions e. Jury,” 8.

24 IM Pei & Associates, “Government Center, Boston, Project No. Mass. R-35,” report prepared for Boston Redevelopment Authority, June 15, 1961, 55.

25 Government Center Commission, “I Program l. City Hall Site,” A Competition to Select an Architect for the New City Hall, 14.

26 Government Center Commission, “I Program m. Civic Design,” A Competition to Select an Architect for the New City Hall, 15.

27 Government Center Commission, “I Program m. Civic Design,” A Competition to Select an Architect for the New City Hall, 16.

28 Letter from the Boston City Hall Competition Jury to Lawrence Anderson, May 3, 1962. Boston City Archives.

29 Peter Collins, “Critique,” Progressive Architecture 44, no. 4 (April 1963): 146. Collins’s critique was a revised and expansion version of his more focussed criticism in Peter Collins, “Action Architecture,” Guardian, September 13, 1962, 6.

30 Hélène Lipstadt, The Experimental Tradition: Essays on Competitions in Architecture (New York: The Architectural League of New York; Princeton Architectural Press, 1989), 160.

31 Jan C. Rowan, “Wanting to Be: The Philadelphia School,” Progressive Architecture 42, no. 4 (April 1961): 131–63.

32 Jan C. Rowan, “Runner-Up in the Boston City Hall Competition,” Progressive Architecture 44, no. 4 (April 1963): 149–53.

33 The other was the entry by Robert Y.S. Hsiung, Ernest V. Johnson, John Ruffing, Waterman, Fuge & Associates Inc. of Cambridge, which was a tower and podium scheme with the council chamber embedded within the podium and which, like the Mitchell/Giurgola entry, visually aligned with Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market.

34 “Two Visitors’ Centers Exemplify New Park Architecture,” Progressive Architecture 40, no. 2 (February 1959): 87.

35 MGA’s Boston City Hall design also predates the completion of Stirling & Gowan’s Engineering Building at Leicester University (1959–63).

36 In the Boston City Hall design, MGA also used a mask/screen device as a monumental gate/bookend to south wall of the lower council chamber building and to sign the mayor’s office and municipal reference library at the eastern end of this lower building. In each case, 45° angle walls faced in brick were opposed by orthogonally aligned walls of glass. This was different and predated Kahn’s treatment of the crown of the service tower of the biological laboratories that formed the second phase of the Richards Medical Research Laboratories, where the glass was aligned at 45 degrees and brick positioned orthogonally.

37 Joseph Rykwert, “Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in 1988,” Process Architecture 81 (1989): 18

38 The term “revetment” appears in the text accompanying the MGA ground floor/plaza State II competition drawing of City Hall, c. 1962 (015.V.019b), Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 267), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

39 For example, honorific volumes appear in the Administration Building, Academy of the New Church, Bryn Athyn, PA (1963); Swarthmore Presbyterian Church, Swarthmore, PA (1965); Worship Assembly Building, Benedictine Society of St Bede, Peru, IL (1973); St Thomas Aquinas Church, Canberra, ACT (1989); and St Patrick’s Cathedral, Parramatta, NSW (2004).

40 Romaldo Giurgola, “On the Discipline of Architectural Thought,” Process Architecture 81 (1989): 6.

41 Boston City Hall, elevation from Dock Square, Stage I competition drawing, 1961. Architects: Mitchell Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane and Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Drawing: Romaldo Giurgola. Source: Mitchell Giurgola Collection, University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

42 Boston City Hall, site plan, Stage II competition drawing, 1962. Architects: Mitchell Giurgola Architects in association with David A. Crane and Thomas R. Vreeland Jr. Source: Mitchell Giurgola Collection, University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

43 G. Holmes Perkins, “Graduate Programs 2: The University of Pennsylvania,” Journal of Architectural Education 19, no. 2 (September 1964): 24–25.

44 David A. Crane, “The City Symbolic,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 26, no. 4 (November 1960): 280–92; David A. Crane, “Chandigarh Reconsidered,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 33, no. 5 (May 1960): 280–92; and David A. Crane, “The Public Art of City Building,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 352, no. 1 (March 1964): 84–94.

45 Romaldo Giurgola, “Architecture in Change,” Journal of Architectural Education 17, no. 2 (November 1962), 104.

46 Giurgola, “Architecture in Change,” 106. Giurgola’s academic colleague and collaborator on the Boston City Hall project also spoke at Cranbrook in 1962. See David A. Crane, “Alternative to Futility,” Journal of Architectural Education 17, no. 2 (November 1962): 94–96.

47 Guido Zucconi, “Gustavo Giovannoni: A Theory and a Practice of Urban Conservation,” Change Over Time 4, no. 1 (March 2014): 76–91.

48 Percival and Paul Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1960 [1947]).

49 Timothy Rohan, “Scenographic Urbanism: Paul Rudolph and the Public Realm,” Places Journal (June 2014), https://placesjournal.org/article/scenographic-urbanism-paul-rudolph-and-the-public-realm/?cn-reloaded=1.

50 Romaldo Giurgola, “Reflections on Buildings and the City: The Realism of the Partial Vision,” Perspecta 9–10 (1965), 109.

51 Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, West Potomac Park, Washington, DC, competition, 1961. Mitchell/Giurgola (collection coll. 015), University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design Architectural Archives.

52 Robert Stern, New Directions in American Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 64–67; Kenneth Frampton, “Foreword” to Mitchell/Giurgola Architects (New York: Rizzoli, 1983), 8; Hélène Lipstadt, “Transforming the Tradition: American Architecture Competitions, 1960 to the Present”, in The Experimental Tradition, 99–100, 160; and John Lobell, The Philadelphia School and the Future of Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2023), 132–34.

53 “Architectural Competitions: A Symposium,” AIA Journal 39, no. 3 (March 1963): 44–53.

54 George Kapelos, Competing Modernisms: Toronto’s New City Hall and Square (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Dalhousie University Press, 2015), 29.

55 Frank W. Crimp, “The Competition for the Boston City Hall,” AIA Journal 39, no. 3 (March 1963): 47.

56 Lisabeth Cohen, “Building Government Center: The Boston Redevelopment Authority, 1960–67,” in Heroic, ed. Pasnik, Kubo and Grimley, 55.

57 Albert Bush-Brown, “Critic Hails Prizewinner: No Copy Cat of Hub Styles,” Boston Globe, May 4, 1962, 17.

58 Sirman, Concrete Changes, 77.

59 Joan Ockman, “The School of Brutalism: From Great Britain to Boston (and Beyond),” in Heroic, ed. Pasnik, Kubo and Grimley, 39.

60 Rowan, “Runner-Up in the Boston City Hall Competition,” 149.

61 Rowan, “Runner-Up in the Boston City Hall Competition,” 151–52.

62 Rowan, “Runner-Up in the Boston City Hall Competition,” 152.

63 At the same time, it is recognised that this paper has not dealt with the broad, interdisciplinary approach to the city, urban planning, and urban design as it was taught at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia between c. 1958 and 1965. It has not attempted to address the competing understandings of “civic design” in the school at that time. As Denise Scott Brown wrote in 1981, “The real importance of the real Philadelphia School for architecture and urbanism has yet to be defined.” That challenge in urban design scholarship remains. See Denise Scott Brown, “Between Three Stools: A Personal View of Urban Design Practice and Pedagogy,” in Education for Urban Design: A Selection of Papers Presented at the Urban Design Educators’ Retreat, April 30–May 2, 1981, El Convento Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico, ed. Ann Ferebee (Purchase, NY: Institute of Urban Design, 1982), 151.

64 Rowan, “Runner-Up in the Boston City Hall Competition,” 152.