The most famous detail of Paul Rudolph’s Boston Government Service Center: the Lindemann Cente
The most famous detail of Paul Rudolph’s Boston Government Service Center: the Lindemann Center’s enigmatic frog face.Arguably the single most surprising and joyful element of the complex, a massive toad-like skullform juts out from the Merrimac Street façade with laconic, big-eyed judgement. Accentuated with arrays of formwork ridges on the undersides of the paired upper barrels, like the eyelashes of drunken pupils, the larger cylinder emphasizes its cantilever with an underbite mouth ajar in a judging frown; its matching sun-ray of supporting grids making for a grille of teeth; a lazy snarl. Taken altogether, the detail is alluringly readable as the head of some huge, amphibious creature; like a giant, vigilant bust—an altar icon of anurous deity of a lost bufotoxic cult. This tripartite assemblage of drum volumes, so startlingly interrupting the dominant horizontal of the elevation, contains an interior meeting room whose dimensions were extruded away from the façade wall. While its logographic affinities were unintentional—Rudolph hardly ever engaged in the symbolic and, when asked, amusingly denied any determined representation or shape-making —the tightly clustered, protruding arrangement so strikingly registers as a pareidolic phenomenon, adding a moment that is whimsical but also, to a certain eye, foreboding. This is especially the case in the context of such a starkly monumental and epically lithic presentation—truly archaeological, nearly mythological. Lindemann Center at the Boston Government Services Center. Paul Rudolph for Desmond & Lord, 1962-71. Photos May 2017 and May & October 2020 @bauzeitgeist. -- source link
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