Submitted by WA Contents

Land Matters

Architecture News - Jul 07, 2008 - 16:06   6530 views

I visited Boston’s City Hall Plaza in the company of one of our LA forums {“In Search of Public Space,” August 2001}, and the place struck me as an urban design disaster—a featureless expanse of brick on which pedestrians look dwarfed and lost. Our forum included four big-city landscape architects and an expert on urban spaces from Harvard. Not one of them had a single good thing to say about it.
Their bad opinion is widely shared. Project for Public Spaces rated it the worst urban plaza anywhere, and while PPS is controversial among landscape architects, in this case it has plenty of company. Ever since the 11-acre plaza was built in the 1960s, Bostonians have repeatedly called for its demolition.
www.asla.org/land/2008/0701/landmatters.html