This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Michael McKinnell, whose heroically sculptural and democratically open design for Boston City Hall catalyzed the city’s urban revival in the late 1960s and embodied the era’s idealism and civic activism, died on March 27 in Beverly, Mass. His wife and architectural partner, Stephanie Mallis, said the cause was the coronavirus. In 1962, the British-born Mr. McKinnell was a 26-year-old graduate student in architecture at Columbia University working as a teaching assistant to the German-born architect Gerhard Kallmann when, almost on a lark, the two entered a competition to design a new Boston City Hall. “They were as amazed as anyone that they prevailed,” Ms. Mallis said.

Source: New York Times April 04, 2020 21:22 UTC