Construction is under way for a 61-story residential tower that will house a hotel and luxury condominiums in Boston’s historic Back Bay. The building, known as Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences One Dalton Street, is being designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and Cambridge Seven Associates.
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. 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 Center.
For the architects, the redevelopment presents a fascinating design challenge, said 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.”
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.
The tower is part of a master plan that includes 30 Dalton—a 27-story 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. Source by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.
Location: Boston, USA
Architect: Pei Cobb Freed & Partners
Partner: Cambridge Seven Associates
Lead Designers: Henry N. Cobb and Roy Barris
Landscape: Van Valkenburgh Associates
Year: 2017
Images: Pei Cobb Freed & Partners