Still standing: Boston Government Service Center, 1971
Architecture Today
Ian Volner - April 18, 2024
Photograph: The Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture.
The Reverend Doctor Keener Rudolph rode the Methodist preaching circuit in the southern United States for nearly 50 years, beginning just after the turn of the twentieth century and continuing through his marriage and the birth of his children, whom he thereafter brought with him from town to town. His youngest, Paul, would always remember his father’s commanding presence in the pulpit — and though he largely rejected religion in later life, it would seem that the son did absorb some of the old man’s convictions, however indirectly. “Often truths must be placed in paradoxes [that] the truths themselves may be revealed,” Reverend Rudolph wrote in one of his published sermons. It could almost stand as a motto for Paul Rudolph’s architectural career.
It has not necessarily made for universal popularity. The paradoxes of Paul Rudolph’s buildings are often tough to crack, and the truths that they reveal are not to everyone’s liking. His most important public commissions, mostly dating to the 1960s, could be typified as Brutalist – not everyone’s cup of tea to be sure, though even that movement enjoys a broader fanbase nowadays than Rudolph’s work, which often seems to preserve Brutalism’s self-seriousness while scrapping its lovable sci-fi eccentricity. But especially in his civic projects, Rudolph was after something different than his concrete contemporaries: not a vision of the urban future, but a visceral expression of the social present; not a machine for forging a new collective identity, but a very human crucible for individual, creative becoming. It’s strong stuff, and in the historic heart of old New England, he served it up with no chaser.
Begun in 1963, and completed eight years later, the Boston Government Service Center is actually two structures, the Charles F Hurley Building and its attached pendant, the Erich Lindemann Building. One could be forgiven for not noticing the distinction: as seen from what is nominally the primary entrance, on its eastern side, the complex presents an unbroken ring of concrete and glass, looming in stepped terraces around a vast interior plaza. Only in navigating the perimeter of the wedge-shaped site, along busy Staniford and Merrimac Streets, does the true nature of the scheme become clear, and with it the distinction between its various components – Hurley, at the southern tip of the C-shaped plan, meets the city with an almost classical façade of regular piers and glazed intercolumnations, while Lindemann to the north presents a dizzying pattern of external staircases, topped by a profusion of sculptural ventilation towers. Clad in Rudolph’s signature corduroy-ribbed concrete, the whole building feels hairy, ornery, a big wild beast squatting in the middle of polite, Hahvard-accented Beantown.
In fact, it was nearly wilder. In his original proposal, Rudolph called for a massive tower near one side of the plaza; the plaza itself was to have been a nautilus- like curl of steps ranged around the high-rise, tricked out with banners and shrubs and vari-textured pavings. As it is, the complex is somewhat less elaborate, though also more confusing than Rudolph intended – and is destined to become only more so: in 1998, the Edward R Brooke Courthouse was added in place of the tower, a rather sedate affair that closes off one side of the courtyard; just a year and a half ago, after the Rudolph portion was threatened with demolition, it was announced that a pending renovation would preserve the existing buildings while adding a series of new, rather more conservative towers on top of Hurley. It was never easy to understand quite what the architect was intending to communicate before, and it’s unlikely to get any easier.
Just the same, the fact that the building is being preserved at all has to be reckoned a huge win: all too often, Rudolph’s high-maintenance public buildings have been dismissed as unworkable, with many succumbing to the wrecking ball in recent years. And though the message it conveys may be garbled, the Government Service Center contains the Rudolphian spirit in one of its purest forms – and certainly at one of its grandest scales.
“Buildings are like people,” Rudolph himself once said. “They can be honest or not so honest.” In his early houses in Florida; at his celebrated Yale School of Architecture in New Haven; as, in a different way, in his late skyscraper projects in East Asia, long after his star in the United States had dimmed: at every stage of his career, Paul Rudolph practiced an unusual variety of honesty, speaking to more than mere architectural truth. A conventional Brutalist might have used raw concrete as a signpost for material candour – a celebration of the building’s actual substance – but those long expanses of bush-hammered roughness in Boston are too theatrical, too emotive for that. A structural purist might have forgone all those trimmings and furbelows – the ovular projections, the crisscrossing walkways – but Rudolph makes a meal out of every projecting volume, every sectional collision. In a building that appears to be frank, confrontational even, almost everything is a kind of gamesmanship. A paradox, in other words, of the very kind Reverend Rudolph long prescribed.
What is the truth embedded in this particular paradox? Certainly, against the background of the Vietnam War, political assassinations, the promise of the Great Society and of the civil rights movement, it’s hard not to see the building as reflecting the fraught American prospect after mid-century, a heroic yet terrifying cri de coeur. There’s something too of urban critique: in the modern technocratic city, Rudolph gives us a monument to funkiness – a stubborn, solipsistic kick right to the bureaucratic solar plexus. But most of all, it might be just that the paradox itself is the truth. Rudolph was a secretive man; even to his intimates, he spoke rarely of himself or of his past. For the government of one of America’s oldest cities, at the height of his renown, the designer made one of his largest public projects into one of his most confounding architectural statements. That may tell us all we need to know.
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