This evening at 5:30 PM, current students and faculty are invited to our last Rewald Seminar of the semester, “Representing the Welfare State” with Dr. Daniel Abramson, Professor of European and American Architecture at Boston University.

What can architectural history teach about the American welfare state? The Massachusetts State Service Center in Boston, designed and built in the 1960s, is best known for the name of its lead architect, Paul Rudolph, and is infamous, too, for its off-putting Brutalist aesthetic. This paper, however, looks at the State Service Center’s architecture from the perspective of the American welfare state, particularly the problems of representing, in architecture and art, the US social service system’s complex relationship to the nation and its citizenry. Reconsideration of the State Service Center’s architecture teaches us about the historical specifics of the American system, and its prospects for the future.