It’s important to start this post with a disclaimer: I did not write it to dump on Brutalism. The building in question is brutalist, with a very 1970s design, and a lot of people do not like that style at all, but the issue that I’m pointing at can and is true of buildings in almost any style you can think of.
That picture is the side facade of a state office building in Boston. The architect carefully designed this facade to match the front facade in style and general level of ornament. In this modernist case, the ornament takes the form of projecting bay windows with curved notches in the concrete on either side. The big second-floor window that takes up most of my picture is the bay window, and if you look at the left and right sides, you can see the notch back into the mass of the building between that projecting window and the columns on either side of it. Again, not to everyone’s taste, but the design intent is clear.
Boston has cold winters and its fair share of rain, wind, and snow. The birds that live there need to find shelter, and those notches are obviously tempting places to get out of the weather and maybe to build nests. The building maintenance staff have put up netting across the notches to keep the birds out. The netting has a fine texture that the camera didn’t pick up well, so here’s an expanded view with arrows to mark the edges of the netting:
The netting is working well to keep birds out, but I have to think that this is a suboptimal outcome. The birds are denied shelter and the architect is denied the clean notches they wanted to set off the bay windows. I doubt there’s an answer that doesn’t involve a huge increase in the maintenance budget for the building.
As proof that this kind of problem is unrelated to the architectural style, Marie wrote about the exact same issue on the Beaux Arts-styled Customs House early this year.
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