Boston to get its Tallest Residential Tower after 1976!

Info & Images: Courtesy Pei Cobb Freed & Partners

  

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Boston’s tallest residential building, designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, breaks ground…

Boston’s historic Back Bay is on its way to have a 61-storey residential tower that will house a hotel and luxury condominiums. The building, known as Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences One Dalton Street, is being designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners  with designers, Henry N. Cobb and Roy Barris, taking the lead and Cambridge Seven Associates (Gary Johnson, lead designer), as the collaborating architects.

 

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It will be the tallest building to rise in Boston since the John Hancock Tower, also designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and completed in 1976.

 

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The new $700 million tower is a project of Carpenter & Company, Inc., whose proposal was selected following a national competition to develop the site, which lies between Christian Science Plaza and the Prudential Centre.

 

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For the architects, the redevelopment presents a fascinating design challenge, says Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. “The project allows us to consider once again how a tall building, together with the open space it frames, can respond creatively to the need for growth, while showing appropriate respect for its historic urban setting.”

 

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The 211-room hotel will occupy the tower’s lower eighteen floors, with 188 residential condominiums on thirty-six floors above. Shaped as a soft triangle in plan and sheathed in low-reflectance high-performance insulating glass, the building rises from a granite-and-glass podium containing the condominium lobby and the public rooms of the hotel. Glass-screened incisions in the tower’s surface animate the building volume, while accommodating operable windows on the condominium floors, whose upper levels feature balconies.

 

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The tower is part of a master plan that includes 30 Dalton - a 27-storey residential building designed by the same team and developed by Pritzker Realty Group - and a 5,000-square-foot park designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.