Kallman was born to Theodore and Olga Jarecki Kallmann in Berlin, Germany, on February 13, 1915.[1] His family was Jewish and intellectual.[2] They moved to the United Kingdom in 1937 and Kallman enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.[1] He immigrated to the United States with his family in 1948.[1] He began teaching at the Chicago Institute of Design less than one year after arriving in the U.S.[1] Kallman became an assistant professor of architecture at Columbia University in 1954.<Central Files, Butler Library, Columbia University>
In the early 1960s, BostonMayor proposed a new city hall as part of plan to revitalize a declining section of the city's downtown.[1] A competition was held to design a new city hall. Kallman, then a professor at Columbia University, and Michael McKinnell, a Columbia graduate student submitted a design for the proposed Boston City Hall in 1962.[1] Kallman and McKinnell defeated many established, better known architects to win the contest for the new city hall.[1] Kallman and McKinnell founded their new firm in 1962 shortly after winning the competition, Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles (now called Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood), and moved to Boston to work on their city hall design.[1] Influences for city hall, a large concrete structure, included the Le Corbusier’s monastery at La Tourette, France.[1]
Boston City Hall, which they designed in a New Brutalism style popular in 1960s, was completed in 1968.[1] Though controversial and even derided among some Bostonians, who have called it a "giant concrete harmonica" and a "dungeon," Boston City Hall had an important impact on the city.[1] While called a "hall of shame" by the urban planning nonprofit, Project for Public Spaces, a 1976 survey of architects named it one of the top ten buildings in the United States.[1]
