DEMOCRATIC FORM: City Hall is part Picasso, De Kooning, and Arbus, part classicism

Now comes Mayor Tom Menino’s proposal — his second in eight years — to build a new city hall on the South Boston waterfront and sell off the current building to developers, presumably for demolition. Beyond the questionable cost-benefit scenarios and concerns about public transportation, Menino’s attack on the building raises a larger question: what form should we give to our democratic institutions?

For better and for worse, the current City Hall is as honest and powerful a portrait of the modern metropolis and its government as we are ever likely to get. That familiar red brick out of which half of Boston is built warps upward to form a new and more aggressive foundation for the city. Towering concrete columns impose order on the sloping plaza, the Parthenon reinterpreted for the age of anxiety. The mayor’s office and Boston City Council chambers poke out in twisted compositions of opaque concrete and transparent glass — doing contorted dances that suggest the nature of democracy in America. And floating above it all are the endless windows of the bureaucrats we rely on to make the city hum. It is a powerful evocation of who we are, not a paint-by-number image of what we would like to be.

There is real beauty in those sculptural forms and majestic spaces, and over the decades friendly critics have proposed a variety of therapeutic solutions for its worst features — its dysfunctional plaza and cold interior — which could unleash Government Center’s potential.

Hanover Street could be extended into the redbrick wasteland on one side, while a pedestrian bridge could cross over the congestion of Congress Street on the other to overcome the isolation that is one of the plaza’s real weaknesses. Adding water, greenery, and well-designed signage, as well as infilling the edges with activity-generating buildings might make it a place that connects rather than divides the city. That monolithic red-brick base could be opened up with shops and cafés that would turn the fortress-like facade into something more inviting. And opening closed entries and ironing out the lumps and bumps in the plaza would reduce the cursing that accompanies a trip from the T stop to Quincy Market. Inside, wood, fabric, and better lighting could warm the building’s cold, hard heart and create more-inviting spaces. And where’s the beer garden that Kallmann and McKinnell envisioned spilling from the interior out to the plaza?

If Mayor Menino wants to leave a lasting legacy, it should come from improving the public realm, not selling it off to the highest bidder, only to encounter the same questions about the true face of our city on a more difficult site somewhere else.