![William T](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/William_T._Young_Library.jpg)
Kallmann McKinnell & Wood is an architectural design firm based in
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1962 as Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles by
Gerhard Kallmann
Gerhard Michael Kallmann (February 13, 1915 – June 19, 2012) was a German-born American architect and academic. Together with Michael McKinnell, Kallman is best known as the lead designer of Boston City Hall, which was constructed in 1968 by ...
(1915-2012),
Michael McKinnell
Noel Michael McKinnell (December 25, 1935 – March 27, 2020) was a British-born American architect and co-founder of the Kallmann McKinnell & Wood architectural design firm. In 1962, McKinnell, who was a Columbia University graduate student at ...
(1935–2020), and Edward Knowles.
History
The firm originated when it won an international competition to design the
Boston City Hall
Boston City Hall is the seat of city government of Boston, Massachusetts. It includes the offices of the mayor of Boston and the Boston City Council. The current hall was built in 1968 to assume the functions of the Old City Hall.
It is a cont ...
in 1962. Soon reconstituted as Kallmann McKinnell and Wood, ("Kallmann, the eldest member of the team,
sGerman born and English educated. ... McKinnell
sEnglish born and educated. ... Both have served as ... educators at the Harvard Graduate School of Design." Henry A. Wood "joined the firm in 1965.") the firm would go on to design structures across the United States and abroad.
While the firm's "early period" consisted of bold structures of poured and pre-cast concrete, its later innovative work more often utilized brick, stone, copper, slate and cast stone, among other materials, for buildings that were less Brutalist in style and more postmodernist. In particular, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, established KMW's new direction with a copper-roofed villa set amidst a stand of woods. The course of the firm's work through the late 1980s was charted in Alex Krieger's exhibition at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and published in the catalog that he edited, The Architecture of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood. In 2004, David Dillon's tome of the same title carried the office's work through the early 21st century.
KMW buildings have won the
Harleston Parker Medal
The Harleston Parker Medal was established in 1921 by J. Harleston Parker to recognize “such architects as shall have, in the opinion of the Boston Society of Architects
One of the oldest and largest chapters of the AIA, the Boston Society of ...
, given out for the best new building in Greater Boston, more times than any other firm in the history of the medal, as documented in the major exhibit of KMW's original drawings for Boston City Hall, from 2008. Drawn from the KMW archive in the collection of Historic New England, this exhibition was presented at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and organized by architect Gary Wolf.
Boston City Hall
The firm's design for Boston City Hall was selected after a two-stage national design competition with 256 entrants. The jury composed of major architects and three prominent Boston businessmen unanimously chose the project because of its logical and successful handling of the competition's complex building program, because of its inventive response to the urban site, and because of its powerful symbolism of a "New Boston." Boston historian Walter Muir Whitehill proclaimed the KMK design to be "as fine a building for its time and place as Boston has ever produced." Horizon Magazine lauded both the design and the competition process itself: "Boston's jury...has turned in a decisive verdict that will stand for some time as a model of responsible civic conduct."
With its concrete massing echoing in an abstract fashion not only the classical cornices of ancient Greece but also the Neo-Classical forms of Federal Boston, and with its brick base creating a continuity with the nearby masonry structures of the Blackstone Block, the building engaged the historic city in ways that the other competition entries did not.
Shortly after the building's opening, ''New York Times'' architecture critic
Ada Louise Huxtable
Ada Louise Huxtable (née Landman; March 14, 1921 – January 7, 2013) was an architecture critic and writer on architecture. Huxtable established architecture and urban design journalism in North America and raised the public's awareness of the ...
wrote: "Boston can celebrate with the knowledge that it has produced a superior public building in an age that values cheapness over quality as a form of public virtue. It also has one of the handsomest buildings around, and thus far, one of the least understood.... It is a product of this moment and these times.... The result is a tough and complex building for a tough and complex age, a structure of dignity, humanism, and power." Public opinion has been mixed, and remains so to this day.
In breaking with the smooth, curtain-wall surfaces and the simplified forms of the then-popular post-Miesian corporate modernism, Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles' design asserted the civic presence of City Hall on the large surrounding plaza. McKinnell spoke of how concrete allowed architects to return to early modernist principles of truthful expression of structure and materials, while reacting critically to the corporate architectural establishment of the time. "After we won the City Hall competition, we were walking along
Madison Avenue
Madison Avenue is a north-south avenue in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, United States, that carries northbound one-way traffic. It runs from Madison Square (at 23rd Street) to meet the southbound Harlem River Drive at 142nd Stre ...
, and we spied
Johnson">hilipJohnson coming towards us, waving his arms in typical Johnsonian fashion. 'Ah! I'm so happy for you two young boys who have won this competition. Absolutely marvelous. I think it's wonderful. And it's so ugly!' We thought that was the greatest praise we could get."
City Hall was published internationally both at the time of its design and upon its completion, and popular publications and tourist guide books featured the building prominently, but unlike the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and Sydney's Opera House (also products of widely publicized design competitions), Boston City Hall never became a symbol of the city, except perhaps in a negative way. Although some tried to associate it with the city's successful reinvention of itself following decades of decline, this never caught on. For many it became symbolic of all that was wrong with Boston's government: rigid, mean, and uncaring of the masses. Said McKinnell: "As we all know, Boston's
mayor
In many countries, a mayor is the highest-ranking official in a municipal government such as that of a city or a town. Worldwide, there is a wide variance in local laws and customs regarding the powers and responsibilities of a mayor as well a ...
wants to sell or preferably tear down City Hall. But as
tructural engineer Bill LeMessurier once said, it will take a controlled
nuclear device
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...
to get rid of this building. So in a very real way, perhaps, we have made our legacy using concrete because it is so bloody difficult to get rid of.... We were right in the sense that architecture had to be rethought as something which is long-lived and, over time, could be decorated, embellished, and adorned by subsequent generations."
As of March 2011, plans are underway to re-think the surrounding plaza in relation to the building.
Designs
![AAAS exterior 1 - Cambridge, MA](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/AAAS_exterior_1_-_Cambridge%2C_MA.JPG)
After being established to see Boston City Hall through to completion, Kallmann McKinnell & Wood continued to design major buildings in Boston, throughout New England, and world-wide. Locally, its many buildings range from Newton, with the City's Public Library, to Boston's Columbia Point, with the University of Massachusetts Boston Campus Center. In New Jersey, the Becton Dickinson corporate headquarters can be found. The
Embassy of the United States
The United States has the second most diplomatic missions of any country in the world after Mainland China, including 166 of the 193 member countries of the United Nations, as well as observer state Vatican City and non-member countries Kosovo a ...
in
Bangkok
Bangkok, officially known in Thai language, Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon and colloquially as Krung Thep, is the capital and most populous city of Thailand. The city occupies in the Chao Phraya River delta in central Thailand and has an estima ...
,
Thailand
Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is bo ...
. The Krieger and Dillon volumes provide comprehensive overviews of the firm's work.
*
Boston City Hall
Boston City Hall is the seat of city government of Boston, Massachusetts. It includes the offices of the mayor of Boston and the Boston City Council. The current hall was built in 1968 to assume the functions of the Old City Hall.
It is a cont ...
and
City Hall Plaza, Boston, Massachusetts
*
Becton, Dickinson and Company headquarters
*
Back Bay (MBTA station)
Back Bay station (also signed as Back Bay · South End) is an intermodal passenger station in Boston, Massachusetts. It is located just south of Copley Square in Boston's Back Bay and South End neighborhoods. It serves MBTA Commuter Rail and M ...
, Boston, Massachusetts
*
Blanton Museum of Art
The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art (often referred to as the Blanton or the BMA) at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the largest university art museums in the U.S. with 189,340 square feet devoted to temporary exhibitions, permanent coll ...
*
University of Massachusetts Boston
The University of Massachusetts Boston (stylized as UMass Boston) is a Public university, public research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the only public research university in Boston and the third-largest campus in the five-campus Un ...
, Boston, Massachusetts
*
Phillips Exeter Academy
(not for oneself) la, Finis Origine Pendet (The End Depends Upon the Beginning) gr, Χάριτι Θεοῦ (By the Grace of God)
, location = 20 Main Street
, city = Exeter, New Hampshire
, zipcode ...
athletics building, Exeter, New Hampshire (1970)
*
William T. Young Library, Lexington, Kentucky
*
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
, Cambridge, Massachusetts
* Mandel Center for the Humanities at
Brandeis University
, mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts"
, established =
, type = Private research university
, accreditation = NECHE
, president = Ronald D. Liebowitz
, pro ...
(2010)
References
Publications
*Dillon, David, The Architecture of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, 2004, Edizioni Press.
*Krieger, Alex, editor, The Architecture of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, 1988, Rizzoli.
External links
Official WebsiteGoogle news archive Articles about Kallmann McKinnell & Wood.
Google news archive Articles about Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles.
* Historic New England
Kallmann, McKinnell and Wood architectural collection 1950-1995
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kallmann McKinnell and Wood
1962 establishments in Massachusetts
Architecture firms based in Massachusetts
Organizations established in 1962