Meet the architect of Burlington High School
If you attended high school in this building, you probably heard a “suburban legend” about the architect. Something about designing prisons for a living and/or committing suicide. Apparently kids can’t cozy-up to this brutalist building, so they make up stories like these.
Brutalism was big in 60s and 70s architecture. It meant a brutally straightforward attitude, unabashed use of concrete, and totally unadorned facades. No pretty skin. No soft or warm anything. Brutalist buildings wear their concrete bones like insects wear their exoskeletons.
This “come as you are” attitude stemmed from the lean years following World War II, when building materials were in short supply. You used concrete and didn’t apologize. By the late 60s, it was hip to show “honesty” in architecture, both here and abroad.
The architect for Burlington High School was Earl Flansburg.
He had nothing to do with prisons. He had a LOT to do with his alma mater, Cornell University. He made a big splash in the architectural world in 1971 when he built Cornell’s campus store directly into a hillside, basically creating a store in a cave.
His firm has done a lot of buildings in the Boston area, including the Park School in Brookline:
And the Boston Design Center in the Seaport District:
One of his children is Paxus Calta, a writer, political activist, philosopher and non-boring person.
The other is John Flansburgh. That’s him on the left. He co-founded the band They Might Be Giants, best-known for this:
Earl Flansburg died in 2009, and not by suicide.
His architectural firm still lives on. Click the photo to visit the website.
So that’s the benign truth about Burlington’s brutalist building. Instead of wincing at it and making up stories, we should consider it ahead of its time. Wouldn’t this look right at home at the front door? Brutalism has entered the automotive space.
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I’m coming up on my 50th high school graduation from Burlington high school class of 1974 that school opened like in May 1973 and the class is 73 wanted to have the graduation at the school. They went to not the school that opened when they were getting out so class of 74 was the first class to Celebrate out of that school concrete loss that school is above. The teachers parking lot was a baseball field a sandlot field that I grew up playing on. They got excavated away to make this concrete thing Burlington.
By far the ugliest building in Burlington. Brutalist is an accurate description. Short for brutal. Lacking in any character whatsoever. Might be charming if you’re doing life Walpole.
sometimes, you had to go uphill, both ways (barefoot, in the snow, etc) to get to your next class. 🙂
Very interesting story thank you.
I graduated from the old High school which is now Marshall Simonds. We were the second graduating class that graduated in 1963. Now, that was a nice school ❤️❤️
We were the first class (76) to spend four years (almost) at the new BHS. We were at Francis Wyman for the first half of our freshman year and then moved to the new school for the second half. At the time, we thought it was a pretty cool place with some “open classrooms”. And the sport facilities were top notch for that time. I have great memories and our band got to play at a couple of the dances. But the building is not attractive at all..
TMBG is one of my favorite bands – what an interesting connection!
I think it’s fair to say the consensus is the school is outdated and unattractive. Burlington has a sizable commercial tax base – So why not tear down the second floors and use the first as a massive foundation for an updated design?
Keep the gymnasium as-is.
I’m unsurprised that all of the silly urban legends people said about the building are untrue! False and misleading information are nothing new and if anything, the internet offers us access to better information! Being somewhat into architecture myself, I would call it more of a modernist, maybe a brutalist lite piece. Besides the libraries and the skylight overhangs over the streets it lacks the large hulking projections that were hallmarks of the style. Bare reinforced concrete was definitely something that was what all of the architects were doing in those days! I haven’t seen it from a detailed point of view, especially from the inside since I was a student, but from memory, it did have some major design flaws that need to be addressed when they go to renovate it in the coming years. I’d love to know what they were thinking with those uncovered mechanical penthouses that seem to do nothing but hold water that leaked into the building. From what I’ve hear those house dx cooling units where they probably should have used a central chiller for a building that size and used larger air handlers instead! It was usually pretty stuffy in there, and think there was an issue with that at some point where they needed to extend the ducts into the classrooms! I think there was reference in another article about the use of VCT/VAT flooring instead of the carpeting specified by the architect due to budget cuts causing noise problems with all of the hard reflective surfaces left exposed. If I were designing a redo I would probably rebuild the upper levels and the streets themselves leaving only some parts of the remaining structure. I would also make sure that exposed concrete is covered since the composite action of all of that reinforced concrete relies on the alkalinity of the concrete remaining intact. The more carbon and other ions continue to attack and lower the pH of the concrete the more of a risk of the rebar inside corroding to the point of expansion and spalling. I see that they removed the paging horn and the handicap entrance sign from the front of the building in this latest picture, I wonder if they’re planning on doing some sort of a protective treatment like they did for the Aquarium and the Harbor Towers in Boston? I think Flansberg Associates should pull out their old blueprints and do the job themselves! They did a nice staged renovation of Salem High!
As a current student, it SUCKS! The teachers are great and all but the complete lack of beauty makes it the most soul-crushing building in Burlington by far. The maintenance seems to be unable to keep up with the building’s ungodly wiring system, and as a result the History hallway always has broken air conditioning (hot and humid in the spring, cold and drafty in the winter). Plus, there’s no incentive to actually keep this building in great shape: since it’s already ugly, nobody really cares if it gets any uglier!
If you can believe it, it was worse when I was a student in the 1990s. The original windows and skylights were completely defective right out of the gate and they created no end of problems with leakage. Every time it rained my freshman homeroom used to turn into a lake! (RM 209 on what was the English hallway at the time, the middle upper level that was originally designed as a business and computers hallway!) I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that there are still leaks from those mechanical penthouses that literally acted like swimming pools collecting water. (Those big grey warehouse looking structures on the roof) From what I hear from a childhood friend of mine who works in maintenance there, they have received funding approval from the SBA to renovate because the science classrooms are out of date, the boilers are at the end of life, and those dx (direct expansion) cooling system units in those penthouses that always seem to break down in the middle of heatwaves are well overdue to be replaces with new air handlers and a central chilling plant! I think you’ll probably be gone before they start, because last time I asked him, they weren’t sure if they were going to partly demolish part of the structure and rebuild them leaving basically the cafeterias, auditorium and gymnasia. Another issue is that the building was built for the baby boom where the town had expanded to need a high school for 2000 students which is what this building is designed for when it has been only using half of that capacity for most of its life. I think it was actually under 1000 students when I was there in the 90s! I remember learning from my freshman design teacher what all of the weird spaces that had fallen into disuse were originally, as he was an ardent defender of the facility. I also remember one of my math teachers who was originally the assistant principal there (Mr Pace) claiming that it was a nice building when it first open until students vandalized it. As someone who is still a student and learning, a nice cautionary tale from this story is that when you design large permanent infrastructure, consider the stakeholders who actually have to live with and use that building in their community for at least its projected lifespan, and probably beyond. You might think a design feature is cool or innovative, but will the people actually using and maintaining the structure find it challenging to work with? What might change about the uses and needs in the coming years? Most people who were there when it first opened experienced the passing flavor of the day with the “open classroom” concept that went the way of “new math” and even from what I hear, the Middle School concept that actually had some staying power for several decades is now reverting back to more of being a Junior High. And yes, a town and its people should have some say over the aesthetics of a space rather than just having architecture for architects shoved down their throats, lest they make up (sub)urban legends about a structure! I went to Umass Amherst, which felt like BHS part two with all of its concrete buildings and their associated urban legends!
For anyone interested in the future of this building: https://www.bhsbuildingproject.com/about
I was so happy I graduated in 1970. I hated that school. It looked like a prison and didn’t get any better inside. It always looked so cold to me. I also hated City Hall in Boston. I worked there one Summer and felt the same way. I enjoyed reading the story about the architect.
Attended in the early ‘80s. I had a locker at the bottom of the street-wide ramps and class on the top floor at the other end of the ramp. Four years burning calories. If it wasn’t for our talented art students painting murals over that concrete (remember the big red devil overlooking the main entry), it would have been doubly miserable than it was from the get go. Come to think of it, our uniquely, black and white themed yearbook spoke volumes about the sense of the atmosphere.
Ah, cybertruck parked outside the front door…it could fit on one the ramps.
It was quite the architectural marvel when it was built but unfortunately it hasn’t held up over time. Yup I remember it being controversial when it was finished but it was new, fresh and huge (9 acres under roof!) and we loved how sprawling the long corridors were and the shiny color scheme (red and orange lockers! Open classrooms! Huge library and use of natural light wherever possible! A real theater and music area to rival a college!) I’m class of 1977. My parents were both keenly involved, mom on the school committee and dad on the building committee (HVAC guy). Definitely more structural problems than anticipated. The geography of the land dictated an untraditional structure. Burlington schools were bursting at the seams (remember double sessions? NOT conducive to a good education) and with 7,200 kids we needed it desperately. So yeah, it was an edgy design by a revered architect at the time and the budget was tight in terms of design and construction. We were the first class to go all four years and from my perspective we thought it was pretty cool.
I am a 1992 graduate of BHS and have worked at Boston City Hall since 2002, I actually like both buildings (I like City Hall better because the architects intended it to be a blank slate, and has some pretty good civic spaces and functions well for what it is, though I suppose the same could be said about BHS with some of the murals and changes of use over the years). When I was a kid, I disliked both, but over the years learned to appreciate and, in some cases, even love béton brut (French for “raw concrete”) architecture.