133 Federal Street sold - Rudolph building (not that Rudolph)

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JohnAKeith

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133 Federal Street sold on Friday. This is the Paul Rudolph building next to the Millennium tower (the other one). The buyer is an individual investor who has planned on turning other buildings into residential. Steve Belkin was the seller. He is the Trans National guy who had proposed tearing it down awhile ago when the parking garage was still next door.
 
For reference...

1765133329429.jpeg

 
Interior floor plates are small, so this could make for a good OTR play.
 
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I'm sure everyone knows, but for any newcomers this was designated as a landmarked building just last year (map link and report below). The designation on the map is "exterior only" so seems like it would be convertible to housing. Love downtown housing, and living in a historic brutalist building would be pretty special.



The report also has some great vignettes about the building's history:

The building at 133 Federal St., colloquially known as the Blue Cross Blue Shield Building (1960), is significant for its associations with the urban renewal movement in Boston’s core downtown area in the 1950s and 1960s. It was the first new building erected in the Central Business District since the1920s and was one of the earliest buildings erected in Boston in the Brutalist style. It is one of three buildings in Boston designed by Paul Rudolph; it is especially notable as his first tall building and a nearly prototype of the idiosyncratic design philosophies that would influence the remainder of his impactful career. Its distinctive form with Y-shaped, precast-concrete piers and columns, large white quartz aggregate, and an innovative engineering and HVAC system hidden within the nonstructural columns were all a direct challenge to the glass curtain wall and pushed the boundaries of contemporary architectural discourse. The building contributes to Boston’s collection of Brutalist architecture, which transformed the city in the 1960s and 1970s, and represents the resulting shift in the design idiom of Boston and the United States from the International style to postmodernism.


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I like this building a lot, but it could definitely use some TLC, especially the plaza, which feels a bit run-down despite being pretty well used. One of the two ground floor retail spaces is vacant. The other is Cosi, directly adjacent to the plaza. Seems like a good candidate to convert to housing.
 
I worked for Gensler when they were in this building. The interior is nothing special. It would be a strange neighborhood to live in...
 
This page includes floorplates, and the entire building is 100' x 100':
1957.03-01.01.0003.jpg

I would LOVE a high-end residential building in Boston that really leaned into the city's brutalist architectural history.

There's also a possibility of building on the terrace directly south of this building, which is part of the same parcel. I recall a proposal for that at one time...
 
That floor plan is straight out of The Apartment. I can’t imagine being productive in that environment.
 
RandomWalk said:
That floor plan is straight out of The Apartment. I can’t imagine being productive in that environment.
Click to expand...

It's possible, just possible, that a radically different sensibility informed the design of high-rise office environments in...

[checks notes]

... 1957, when Paul Rudolph was envisioning 133 Federal?

(Also, is it possible, just possible, that the building's 21st-century tenants substantially adapted their leased spaces in keeping with modern sensibilities?)
 

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133 Federal Street and 155 Congress Street (originally addressed as 70 Federal Street for the Massachusetts General Life Building* from 1965) are my favorite "postwar" office buildings in the Financial District. Each has clarity of form, lucidity of details, and fits in well / plays well with others.

* https://buildingsofnewengland.com/tag/70-federal-street-boston/
 
DBM said:
It's possible, just possible, that a radically different sensibility informed the design of high-rise office environments in...

[checks notes]

... 1957, when Paul Rudolph was envisioning 133 Federal?

(Also, is it possible, just possible, that the building's 21st-century tenants substantially adapted their leased spaces in keeping with modern sensibilities?)
Click to expand...
Personal computers weren't even a thing yet when Rudolph was designing this.

But yeah, tenants always build out their own spaces as they see fit. The sketched "TYPICAL FLOOR PLAN" shouldn't be interpreted as the actual layout on each floor when this opened. Ride the elevator of any downtown office building and you'll see each floor -- or even each suite within one floor -- often looking totally different with different layouts and different furnishings. This is true now and was also true in Rudolph's era.

All that being said, I'm sure many modern office workers would prefer their own assigned personal desks over the hotdesk / hotel model often employed now.

PercyL said:
133 Federal Street and 155 Congress Street (originally addressed as 70 Federal Street for the Massachusetts General Life Building* from 1965) are my favorite "postwar" office buildings in the Financial District. Each has clarity of form, lucidity of details, and fits in well / plays well with others.

* https://buildingsofnewengland.com/tag/70-federal-street-boston/
Click to expand...
I watched Free Guy the other day and found it interesting that 70 Federal stood in for the protagonist's apartment building. A fictional office-to-residential conversion...
 
Yes, it was one of my favorite little choices that they made in that film, in addition to highlighting at least the exterior of what is now known as One Liberty Square (which will have its centenary next year) - but created a different internal "bank" space for its wonderful elliptical lobby that is entered from the outer long side. I love internal elliptical spaces like that.
 
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