Kallmann McKinnell & Wood

In particular, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 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.

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.

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.

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, and we spied [Philip] Johnson coming towards us, waving his arms in typical Johnsonian fashion.

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.