Gerhard Kallmann, who died June 19 at 97, was a little-known instructor at Columbia University in 1962 when he and Michael McKinnell unexpectedly won the design competition for a new Boston city hall. It would prove to be one of the most argued-about American buildings of the past 50 years, cherished by many architects but not always by ordinary Bostonians. An energetic exercise in brutalist architecture, it consists of an asymmetrical group of cantilevered concrete boxes that provide work spaces for the mayor and city council, topped by bristling rows of windowed offices, all resting on tall, flat piers. "It had...
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