There’s links to background on the building, the Boston Government Service Center (BGSC), known as the Lindemann Center ( designed by Paul Rudolph and opened in 1972) which turns out to be notorious:
…Rudolph chose to sacrifice the function of the Lindemann Center to further an emotive agenda. The essential aim was to express the program of the building, while creating within an environment “suitable” for the mentally ill. Thus, the spaces inside reflect Rudolph’s romanticized view of mental illness: eerie, twisting stairways, one of which leads nowhere like an oubliette in a Medieval keep; amorphous passages that never reveal their ends; a chapel that creates a stirring, dismal ambiance through spatial theatrics. On the exterior this atmosphere is communicated through an unwitting architecture parlante–not a symbolic program but a concoction of private motifs–intended to perpetuate the mood at a subconscious level. In short, Rudolph made the building “insane” in order to express the insanity within.
(…)
Responses to this environment are predictably tragic. Horror stories of patients lost in the building are common, as are accounts of assaults on patients and staff in its many dim, secluded alcoves. Indeed, the building has proved to be so insidious that it is possible to hold certain spaces responsible for repeatedly abetting self-destructive acts. A catwalk over the Lindemann’s plaza-level lobby had to be glazed after it invited too many suicide attempts. The chapel, a top-lit chamber called out on the skyline with a crowning finial, is experienced as the heart of the building, what Rudolph once called “that releasing space which dominates.” It has been sealed shut since shortly after the building opened in 1972; a patient died there after igniting himself on the concrete slab altar. As one former Lindemann Center psychiatrist noted darkly, the patient was just following environmental cues: “It looks like a place that should be used for human sacrifice.” (more)
I vaguely recall hearing this story before, years ago, but I never saw pictures.
(via… I forgot)
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