the original plan for the Harbor Towers called for three stacks of rental units, plus a parking garage, done in the Brutalist style of the day: all raw concrete and hard angles. (Peter Forbes, an architect who lived in the towers in the mid-’90s before moving to Florence, Italy, points out that such a design was considered a “heroic gesture” in the late 1960s, an effort to “get away from the steel and glass skyscraper of the ’50s, which people were beginning to feel was cold and impersonal.”) In order to free up the space for the project, the BRA also allowed the historic India Wharf Building to be demolished. “In retrospect,” writes Cobb, the towers’ architect, “[that move] was arguably a mistake.”
Of course, there were limits to how big a chance the developers would take. Because they couldn’t be certain anyone would want to live out in the grubby hinterland that was the waterfront, three towers eventually became two, with a pool installed where the third was to have stood.
