Skanska Office Tower | 380 Stuart Street | Back Bay

^That proposal(Tower Fifth[more like tower filth]) is pretty much dead now, at least.
 
Yeah most of NYC's supertalls are kinda cringeworthy. The exceptions being the Nordstrom tower and and that 457 Park Ave (which is merely meh but still better than those ugly anorexic supertalls). Correction: 432 Park.
 
DZH22 said:
There are many other supertalls coming up that will balance the skyline a bit better, but IMO this proposal at 1556' (center right with bulge near the top) will be the classless coup de grace. I don't know if NYC is capable of coming back from this one.

View attachment 14472
Click to expand...
Eliminate the bumpout near the top and add a spire, then it wouldn't be so bleak.
 
When I look at Hudson Yards, aside from all the wonderful things it achieves (covered enough elsewhere), from any distance of more a half mile away, once you get past the incredible tallness of things, it is a clump of glass boxes that are all more or less the same shade of glass - whether it is the 2 pointy Related towers or the 3 Brookfield Towers next door at Manhattan West. Walls and walls of the same silvery blue glass.

I like how this Skanska proposal does that stack thing. This neighborhood isn't a bunch of glass boxes aside from the Boss of all bosses of glass, 200 Clarendon. Even with Raffles on board, there is still enough variety for it to provide a nice contrast.
 
Nibbles O’Plenty said:
40 Broad Street had a beautiful Art Deco lobby with all the trimmings. About twenty years ago…it was all replaced…with plain white paneling. This should be criminal!
Click to expand...


There is an architect going around "modernizing" a lot of the bases of older buildings--generally for the worse. It looks good for about 10 years and then just needs to be redone. If you have a cool older space, embrace it.
 
I really don’t hate this building. In fact, I find the pedestrian experience rather refreshing along this stretch.
The view the Commons / Garden is an interesting contrast.
 
BCDC with minor changes: https://bpda.app.box.com/s/n8yie6t63yx66i0z0urlh0x7cpa6vve3

The jerks rendered in the Copley Place Tower ;)

1638797104090.png
 
found5dollar said:
I find this building, particularly the new ground floor, very exciting. Those passageways look great.
Click to expand...

I agree this is great. I hope they keep the bold red for the passageway structure. The public needs to be invited in to features such as this. Too often we see supposed public-access features of corporate buildings camouflaged-in to the point where it's unclear there's a break in the exclusive-corporate-monotony. It'd be refreshing to have something bold there at the street-level.
 
I think some more outdoor seating for the cafe/restuarant would help with that too. This would be a pretty easy spot to keep heated outside during the winter too...👀
 
What are the developments to the left of the Hancock?
 
Hancock garage redevelopment, 40 trinity, copley tower (cancelled).
 
If they would just deck the Pike here between Berklee, Clarendon, and Dartmouth to Back Bay Station, they could knit this neighborhood together and open up opportunities for more towers. There's so much opportunity here every time I walk over the bridge from the South End to Club Cafe I look at all the wasted opportunities, even with those stupid parking lots there. That said, I do like this 380 Stuart building proposal and am surprised at how big and wide it looks in these renders compared to what I thought the existing space was.
 
gac108 said:
If they would just deck the Pike here between Berklee, Clarendon, and Dartmouth to Back Bay Station, they could knit this neighborhood together and open up opportunities for more towers. There's so much opportunity here every time I walk over the bridge from the South End to Club Cafe I look at all the wasted opportunities, even with those stupid parking lots there. That said, I do like this 380 Stuart building proposal and am surprised at how big and wide it looks in these renders compared to what I thought the existing space was.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it was one huge wasted opportunity called "Columbus Center" - there's a whole thread on this forum (warning: soul-crushing): https://archboston.com/community/threads/columbus-center-rip-back-bay.970/
 
Idk why they cant just deck the pike and build a greenway on top. It would be pretty cheap, then just move the roads off the sides onto the decking, and develop the parcels to the sides that are on solid ground. Its much cheaper to build over solid ground, and much cheaper to deck over a highway vs build buildings over a highway. We get a greenway, they get real estate, everyone wins.

-Bonus would be to connect it on one end to the southeast corridor park, and the other to the greenway. Youd have a continuous pedestrian/bike path from mass ave to govt center.
 
^Not saying it's impossible, but it's not easy as 1-2-3 either. I've thought about it a bit, and while this isn't the thread for it, I'll share my conclusions I reached ~last year. I can share sources if desired - they're in some messy list in a text file that I'd have to sort through.

It's still a large and long bridge handling a lot of different loads you have to design for. Baseline bridge replacement unit costs in 2017 for MA were $472/sq ft. Even if you just put a park space above and relocate the roadways, that's a pretty substantial cost. It likely would be a tad higher than the $472/sf considering rising construction costs and increased loads from the parkway (soil is heavy and static, while the roadway loads are dynamic, and everything would probably be asymmetric), say $550-600/sf at an optimistic level (though this is likely calling for a complex construction method -$$$), plus $10/sf for the park (based off the adjusted $/acre for the Greenway). I forget if the reconstruction costs included costs associated with utility relocations/accommodations, but those are definitely going to be present, and will likely add more to your cost. And, sorry to keep growing the list, but doubling the size of the Greenway would mean doubling the maintenance budget, which is already getting a lot of heat for how much it costs and how shallow their pockets are getting. Realistically, who pays for this? It's screaming Public-Private-Partnership, with emphasis on the private part. MassDOT doesn't really get much at all from this (perhaps a loss in maintenance and ops), City of Boston possibly gets increased tax revenue, and developers get much higher RE values.

Could a few real estate developers pull it off? I'd say it's not entirely off the table, but it's not near the top of their list right now. You'd need to be established in a booming market that's ready to hand out loans with increased risk. (I suppose you could to that now with lab space, but who really wants lab space in urban centers? The city is screaming for housing, and I'd consider living next to Greenway 2.0 if I had the cash). The next step (that I never got to) is sketching out a possible layout (there's a sketch somewhere on aB that seemed to work great), calculating SF of new real estate vs sq ft of park and roadway, and narrowing down your construction $/sf, seeing how much you can sell your RE for ($/sf), and compare it to your costs. Long term, the payback can possibly be there for devs and the city (assuming the park is non-profit-operated), and the community and health benefits are great, but that's long term, and very few of us look at the long term with enough care, especially lenders (who run the show) recently...

(Sounds like a good starting point for a thesis project for any prospective arch/civil/ResD students reading, if any).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top