This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

There have been tens of thousands of deaths as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

All have been tragic.

But there are two people in particular that we've lost to COVID that were part of the world of architecture and design that we want to honor with a couple of stories today.

First, we are mourning the loss of architect Michael

McKinnell. Along with Gerhard Coleman, McKinnell designed the

unforgettable Boston City Hall completed in 1968.

They won the Commission for Boston City Hall after submitting their brutalist heroic

monument in a contest when Michael McKinnell was just 26 years old.

It was always a controversial structure.

Much of the public found it ugly and too unconventional,

but architects and critics tend to love it.

This is often the case with brutalism more generally, and that is the subject of a piece starring

Boston City Hall that Avery Shuffman reported for us back in 2015.

To celebrate Michael Mackinil's life, we're going to play that story for you now.

It's one of my favorites.

I hope you like it. The best James Bond is either Sean Connery or Daniel Craig.

I lean towards Daniel Craig.

The new movies are just better.

But the Sean Connery films definitely had the best villains.

There's Blofeld, of course, who's so iconic that he turned the act of cat stroking

into a thing that super villains do.

...