Today, the optimism of the movement is often forgotten and many of the buildings suffer from years of poor maintenance and are facing insensitive renovation or demolition. Architects who have renovated important modernist buildings will talk about the challenges and opportunities and explain their work locally on buildings such as Sert’s BU Law Tower and Alvar Aalto’s Baker House at MIT as well as internationally on sites such as the Gropius’s US Embassy in Greece and the UN Headquarters.

The arrival of Edward Logue as the head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority ushered in a new generation of buildings in Boston. Both the politics and the design of this period could be described as bold, often controversial, and of a scale that had not been seen before. Starting with the completion of the Prudential Tower, this era redefined the skyline, streetscape, and aspirations of the region.

While the Boston region was home to a number of large modernist projects, it was also an area that brought the zeitgeist of the movement to stores and museums. Kitchen utensils, fabrics, and furniture brought modern interiors to the average consumer and exhibitions and the cultural spaces made modernism part of the cutting edge scene.

Often problematically labeled as “Brutalist” architecture, the concrete buildings that transformed Boston during 1960s and 1970s were conceived with progressive-minded intentions by some of the world’s most influential designers, including Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, I. M. Pei, Henry Cobb, Paul Rudolph, Josep Lluís Sert, and The Architects Collaborative. As a worldwide phenomenon, building with concrete represents one of the major architectural movements of the postwar years, but in Boston it was deployed in more numerous and diverse civic, cultural, and academic projects than in any other major U.S. city. Boston was an urban laboratory for the exploration of concrete’s structural and sculptural qualities. Heroic surveys the intentions and aspirations of this period and considers anew its legacies—both troubled and inspired.