Boston and Cambridge
City Hall
This page illustrates some of
the ways social structures and political systems are expressed in
architecture. In the eighteenth century when New England was a farmer,
merchant, and artisan democracy, it used Faneuil Hall (top) for town
meetings. This plain red-brick Georgian building was where male citizens
engaged in face-to-face political debate and action. By the
late-nineteenth century, in the aftermath of industrial revolution and
Civil War, New England was divided into distinct social classes. And
Boston's governing assembly moved into this French style, Second Empire,
City Hall (middle). This is an architecture of cohesive upper-class rule
by wealthy Boston Brahmins. They embraced an ethos of European-styled
cultural superiority of the sort captured by novelists Edith Wharton and
Henry James. The life span of this fusion between class rule and cultural
hierarchy was between 1870 and 1920. Finally, Government Center (bottom),
the modernist cement building, is the architecture of a post-industrial
society run by managerial elites. This reflects a period (1950s to the
present) of admnistration by white-collar, computer-literate bureaucrats
without an aptitude for direct democracy or a taste for
aesthetics. |
Faneuil Hall
|
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- Previous Photo: Boston's Government Center
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Yale University Library and Sociology Department. The Social Life of
Cities.
This Page Last Modified: February 7, 1997
Copyright 1996-97, Yale University. All rights reserved.
URL is http://www.yale.edu/socdept/slc