the iconic building problem

I once made a claim in a blog post from last year that I would someday make a forceful argument against Boston City Hall. Today is not that day. I want to talk about iconic buildings in a more general sense, by making the claim that they don't matter as much as architects like to think they do. For evidence, I cite the everyday experiences of most Americans, who follow very predictable movement patterns and experience architecture in a comprehensive way in three to five places each day. Home, work, school, and shopping center are the primary building types of the modern human. I should add church, but church attendance is a tricky thing because it happens weekly if at all. Not many people find themselves at Boston City Hall every day, and if they happen to work in an iconic high rise then the experience may be so routine so as to be stripped of wonder, or may even have distinctly negative associations.

Architectural place, civic pride, and the manufactured sense of delight that is the critical responsibility of architects and designers, belongs in all of those ordinary places. The grand building at the end of the avenue, where the human sacrifices are made to appease an angry god, is less of a ritual necessity. The functional experiences of the suburb, the strip mall and the urban center are tempered by their uneasy relationship to a distant past where media was crude and distances were insurmountable.