Michael McKinnell, who helped design Boston City Hall, dies of COVID-19 complications
McKinnell, 84, had tested positive for the virus before he died.
In an undated photo, architect Michael McKinnell sits behind his Rockport home, looking toward the Atlantic Ocean.
One of the architects behind the Boston City Hall’s Brutalist design has passed away due to complications from COVID-19.
Michael McKinnell, the renowned architect who, along with the late Gerhard Kallman, drew up the plans for what has turned out to be one of Boston’s perhaps most-debated building designs, died on Friday. He was 84.
McKinnell, who lived in Rockport, decided to forgo the offer of a respirator at Beverly Hospital, according to The Boston Globe. He instead asked for hospice; he had felt ill for about a couple of weeks before his death. He later was found to have COVID-19 and X-rays revealed he also had pneumonia.
The design of Boston City Hall catapulted McKinnell and Kallmann into fame for architecture, though neither of them were licensed architects when their design for a new Boston City Hall was chosen from 256 entries in 1962. McKinnell, who grew up in Manchester, U.K., moved to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in architecture at Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship, according to Architect Magazine. Kallman was his professor.
Since then, Kallmann and McKinnell established Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles, an architecture practice, which today is Kallman McKinnell and Wood Architects, and Boston City Hall still stands, having deflected years of criticism and ridicule off its concrete sides, and survived former Mayor Tom Menino’s promise to demolish it, an idea that Mayor Marty Walsh campaigned on.
“City Hall is so ugly that its insane upside-down wedding-cake columns and windswept plaza distract from the building’s true offense,” wrote Paul McMorrow in a 2013 column for The Boston Globe. “Its great crime isn’t being ugly; it’s being anti-urban. The building and its plaza keep a crowded city at arm’s length.”
Despite the building’s way of bringing out strong feelings and criticism, it celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019, and McKinnell joined with Walsh to celebrate the city’s “favorite Brutalist building.”
McKinnell and Walsh during a cake cutting celebrating City Hall’s 50th birthday.
Kallman and McKinnell went on to design a number of other buildings in Massachusetts, and outside of it. They claim the designs of the Hynes Convention Center, as well as Cambridge’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences building.
While living in Rockport, McKinnell and his wife, Stephanie Mallis, painted and exhibited their work at Mercury Gallery in town.
“He painted all his life, but he never wanted to show his paintings because he was very self critical,” Amnon Goldman, director of Mercury Gallery, told the Gloucester Daily Times. “So we dragged him out of the closet, so to speak, three or four years ago (with his own exhibition). He was a fabulous painter.”
Before he died, McKinnell detailed to Mallis plans for a small garden with white roses where he wanted his ashes scattered behind their Rockport home, she told the Globe.
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