Instead of remodeling, maybe they just should have started over

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In the “what-were-they-thinking” dept., somebody in charge at the Apollo Theater complex on Lincoln Avenue has managed to do what seemed impossible: making one of the city’s most unappealing and poorly functioning buildings even more so.

When this retail/condo monstrosity appeared in the late 1970s, “brutalism” was still the buzzword in architecture: big, honking slabs of poured-in-place concrete meant to look raw, unpolished and, well, brutal. This worked out ok in places like Boston City Hall and Yale’s Art and Architecture Building, but not here. The building was later “postmodernized” with a Dryvit decorative cornice, which only made it worse.

Hands down the weirdest feature of this building was the design of the storefronts on Lincoln, with spaces recessed from the property line in a split-level arrangement a few steps above and below grade. Windows in each space sloped inward and joined, creating, uh…nothing. Just a hollow, negative, totally useless space.

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Now, in what has to be the stupidest remodeling project conceived in recent memory, management apparently concluded that it could improve the curb appeal of the storefronts by bringing the facade back to the Lincoln Avenue street wall, so it put up glass and steel partitions at the sidewalk’s edge. Yet the interior remains precisely the same.

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This moronic remodeling doesn’t create new space, nor does it improve the utility of what’s there already. All this seems to have accomplished is the creation of two additional surfaces that must be cleaned and maintained regularly.

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