The Boston Government Service Center
Even if you have never stepped a foot within the city limits of Boston, Massachusetts, the chances that you have seen and recognize this building are good. The Boston Government Service Center, home to both the state government Charles F. Hurley Building and the Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center, is the filming location for the Massachusetts State Police Headquarters in Martin Scorsese’s crime drama, The Departed.
Even to the untrained eye in matters of engineering and architecture, a person can immediately tell that the Boston Government Service Center’s design is undeniably unique – it is futuristic, rugged, solid, cavernous, labyrinthine, and as imposing psychologically and physically. For more examples, check out these thumbnails below:
None of these design or aesthetic elements are by accident. Designed by architect Paul Randolph, the unfinished building’s structure originates from a school of architecture called Brutalism. Defining characteristics of Brutalist architecture include the preference & utilization of tough, rugged, building materiel (e.g. concrete, stone, brick, steel), having designs and shapes evoking the images of having strength and/or a solid mass or bulk, and ensuring designs express and maximize functionality.
It is no surprise that many of these buildings are made to look and feel like urban fortresses. This style became readily popular and was adopted in the construction of American government buildings, universities, and high-rise apartment buildings. Its true heyday beginning in the 1950s (thus connecting it to the overall classic retro culture that so heavily influences and permeates the world of Fallout), Brutalism was particularly popular in post-World War II Europe as they needed to quickly rebuild their national infrastructure ravaged by war inexpensively yet functionally efficient. It is not unreasonable to extrapolate that a similar mentality could have diffused into the minds of survivors of a nuclear apocalypse; if Brutalist structures have survived the nuclear fallout, such buildings in Boston may be a source of promise and preference to these folks.
A key element within the world-building of Fallout, in particular to the Vaults designed by the Vault-Tec Corporation, is that there belies a secretive social scientific maxim that guides the particular design and function of any given Vault. Sometimes, the results and implications are outright horrifying as elaborated in an excellent piece written by resident Fallout expert – Stan Guderski. Eerily enough, the Boston Government Service Center also follows this logic. As revealed in an excellent analysis of the building’s architecture in a treatise written by Michele Kol called “The Architecture of Insanity: Boston Government Service Center”, we are given a glimpse into the mad logic of Randolph that sought to mirror the building’s Brutalist architecture with mental health disorder psychological states, as referenced here:
In designing this post-war urban renewal mental health facility, Rudolph experimented with the idea of the “psychology of space.” The Lindemann Center, a Brutalist mammoth of jagged stone appears cold, intimidating and alien and was the perfect location for the paranoia-inducing 2006 Martin Scorsese crime film The Departed. With its sci-fi looking exterior, cave-like corridors, amorphous passageways and spiral staircases, it can often be disorientating and psychologically disturbing…
…he had hoped to create a landscape that would reflect the interior mental states of inmates suffering from Alzheimer’s, dementia or schizophrenia. Armed with his theory of psychology, Rudolph tried to recreate the hallucinogenic or exaggerated mental and emotional states of the insane with neverending inchoate corridors, a chapel with a dismal atmosphere and macabre twisting stairways, one of which, like an oubliette in a medieval keep, leads nowhere…
Judging from what Kol had written, Randolph and his Brutalist creations would be right at home under the employment of Vault-Tec Corporation.
