Architect Paul Rudolph’s love of the sublime ended up creating a downtown fortress — but may yet offer a new vision for the city

Robert Perron.Paul Rudolph’s Government Service Center.

Government Center is the architectural complex that Bostonians most love to hate—a windswept, monolithic presence in the center of their 19th-century downtown. City Hall is its most famous and controversial building, but not far away stands one even stranger and more forbidding: the concrete brutalist castle between Staniford, Merrimac, and New Chardon streets.This is the Government Service Center, designed by architect Paul Rudolph. Never completed, it feels to most passersby like just another part of a great civic misstep, a troubled development that exemplifies the most alienating qualities of 1960s urbanism.

The Government Service Center is little visited today, and even less loved. But that is, in part, because visitors miss something important about it. Even frequent visitors to the area may not realize that if you step inside, there is revealed a wondrous interior courtyard like something from baroque Rome, a space that even in its incomplete and neglected state contrasts sharply with nearby City Hall and its alienating plaza......Continue Reading

> via The Boston Globe