The city’s preservation panel decided this week to seek legislation granting landmark status to The Morris A. Mechanic Theatre – perhaps one of the least loved buildings in Baltimore – after developers of the downtown site requested permission to tear down the massive concrete structure.

But it may already be too late for the city’s 1967 homage to the mid-century’s Brutalist architecture movement, which looks like it could withstand a direct hit from a bunker-buster bomb. The city is eager to redevelop the site, the center of Baltimore’s traditional downtown.

Even some foes of demolition are less than enthusiastic about the Mechanic.

“I was always convinced it was a bad idea, that building,” said Larry Gibson, a lawyer and member of the city’s  Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, or CHAP. “Last month I turned 70 years told, and I’m having a little trouble regarding something built in the 1960s as historic.”

But Gibson went along with CHAP commissioners Tuesday anyway, and supported a plan to ask the mayor and city council to grant landmark status for the Mechanic.

Many area architects also support saving the Mechanic. In a letter to CHAP Baltimore AIA president Kathleen Starghill-Sherrill urged, on behalf of her board and members, that the theater be preserved and reused, because it is a rare Baltimore example of the Brutalist style.

But there are plenty of critics. Playgoers reportedly panned its sight lines and acoustics while actors disliked its cramped spaces. Today it is boarded up and the concrete is crumbling in places.

CHAP recommended that the Mechanic be made a landmark building in 2007, but the city Planning Commission rejected the nomination a year later. Starghill-Sherrill wrote that it was the first time that this had happened in the 40-year history of CHAP.

She noted that the city solicitor had advised that the Planning Commission’s verdict on the proposal was advisory only, and that CHAP could send their recommendation directly to the city council.

“Functionally and Physically Obsolete?”

The developer of the site, One West LLC, originally proposed a plan that would have preserved the Mechanic, at the corner of Charles and West Baltimore streets, in the heart of the traditional city center.

But the company recently filed for a permit to demolish the theater and build two 30-story towers in its place, as part of a plan to create new retail space and 600 apartments, according to media reports.

Howard Brown, a partner in the development group, was recently quoted in The Daily Record calling the building “functionally and physically obsolete.”

Brown’s company, David S. Brown enterprises, did not respond to a request for comment from The Brew as of Tuesday afternoon.

Likened to an Insecticide Factory

Architects may have a tender spot for the Mechanic, but others have made a hobby of hating on it. In 2001, the Baltimore City Paper lumped the Mechanic with the west wing of the Walters Art Museum, also built in the Brutalist style, as among the city’s most egregious architectural outrages.

City Paper writer Brennen Jensen called the Mechanic an example of “Brutalist bumbling.”

“The . . . rawly exposed cement, the purposeful championing of function over form, the relentless drabness,” he wrote. “It looks like an insecticide factory or an electric-power substation rather than a palace for the performing arts.”

The British newspaper the Daily Mail reported in November 2009 that a website, the Virtual Tourist.com,  had named the Mechanic as number one on its top ten list of the world’s ugliest buildings.

Other well-known Brutalist buildings include Boston City Hall and the Theodor Geisel Library at the University of California at San Diego, which appeared as the exterior of a research lab in Killer Tomatoes Strike Back, the third in the four-part Attack of the Killer Tomatoes movie series.