Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture


John F. Kennedy Federal Building, Boston, MA.
"The British author Douglas Adams had this to say about airports: 'Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of special effort.' Sadly, this truth is not applicable merely to airports: it can also be said of most contemporary architecture. ... Or take Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Downtown Boston is generally an attractive place, with old buildings and a waterfront and a beautiful public garden. But Boston’s City Hall is a hideous concrete edifice of mind-bogglingly inscrutable shape, like an ominous component found left over after you’ve painstakingly assembled a complicated household appliance. In the 1960s, before the first batch of concrete had even dried in the mold, people were already begging preemptively for the damn thing to be torn down. ..."
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