115 Federal St. (Winthrop Square)

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The Globe said:
Renowned architect quits tower project

By Thomas C. Palmer Jr., Globe Staff | March 17, 2007

The famed architect behind the audacious 1,000-foot environmentally sensitive skyscraper planned in downtown Boston, Renzo Piano, has split with the building's developer, Steve Belkin. Piano's original design for the building, which would be the tallest in the city and has received major support from Mayor Thomas M. Menino, was for an unusual tower of glass floating over a ground-level park.

A senior executive at Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Genoa, Italy, yesterday said the split involved a dispute over creative control of the tower.

"There have been requests to change" the building, said the executive, who asked that his name not be used because he had not discussed his remarks with Piano. "Some modifications were asked for. We felt they weren't appropriate," he said, but declined to elaborate on what those issues were.

Piano was traveling in California yesterday and couldn't be reached for comment.

Belkin's company, Trans National Properties, issued a statement with Piano's firm that did not discuss why the architect departed.

Rather, the statement said Trans National thanked Renzo's firm "for its inspired artistic vision for the site and its now completed involvement." Trans National said the Boston-based architect on its team, CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares Inc., would have "sole future responsibility for architectural design and execution." Belkin couldn't be reached for comment.

In an article published this month in The New York Times, Piano was described as being "under pressure from Mr. Belkin to increase the tower's width, something he said he could not agree to do."

Belkin and Piano unveiled the Italian architect's design for the 80-story building in November. The design called for the glass tower to have reflectors that would direct sunlight to the ground-level public space, external elevators to whisk visitors to a restaurant and public space at the rooftop, and a supermarket and parking below.

Belkin was the sole respondent to Menino's solicitation last year for proposals to build a skyscraper on the site of a decrepit city-owned parking garage between Winthrop Square and Federal Street. In January, the Boston Redevelopment Authority officially selected Belkin as site developer.

"I called for world-class architects to come up with a building that reflects all the greatness and potential of Boston," Menino said when Belkin and Piano unveiled their design in November. "Today's proposal . . . promises everything we asked for."

Yesterday Menino said, "From what I understand, it's still a Piano-inspired design, and I'm happy about that."

Neither the joint statement nor the Piano executive indicated whether Belkin and CBT would keep the Italian architect's striking design, all or in part .

Belkin's project had already lost a key player when the leader of the development management team at Meredith & Grew, Daniel O'Connell, left to become secretary of the state Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development in the administration of Governor Deval Patrick.

O'Connell was a partner and experienced development professional who previously worked at Spaulding & Slye and helped prepare the massive Fan Pier on the South Boston waterfront for development. He was replaced by Yanni Tsipis, a vice president who has been with the firm's development group for years.

Belkin is an experienced businessman who helped launch the affinity credit card market, and has interests in travel, financial, and other industries. This is his first effort as a real estate developer. Other developers have privately said a project of the size proposed by Belkin would be difficult and expensive to build, even for an experienced developer.

Piano is known for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he designed in the 1970s, and for many other idiosyncratic buildings, like the Kansai Airport Terminal in Osaka, Japan. His new headquarters for The New York Times Co., which owns The Boston Globe, opens at Times Square this spring.

Thomas C. Palmer Jr. can be reached at tpalmer@globe.com
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Yesterday Menino said, "From what I understand, it's still a Piano-inspired design, and I'm happy about that."

Maybe the Mayor should have addressed the "quagmire" that developers get caught in when they attempt to build a major project in Boston. Community activists, architectural societies, city agencies, state agencies, neighborhood groups that don't even live near a project....and more....all gather up their lawyers and spokespersons to dig in their heels for their own special interests and concerns. Too much housing, not enough housing, build more parks, don't build any more parks, more retail, free childcare, shadows cast between 3 pm and 4 pm on my trees, my views will be ruined, build a museum in my honor!! Seriously, if you've read this forum for long enough, all of the above are fought for by different groups. It's gonna take an act of the legislature, it seems, to get NorthPoint built! Fan Pier, Columbus Center, the list could go on and on. It's a wonder anything is built in this town. Actually, no one should be surprised at this new development. Piano definitely could see the writing on the wall with this one. Hopefully, this will jump-start a movement to seriously review all the hoops that developers have to jump through to get things built. I'm not suggesting to give free-reign to anyone with the bucks and land to do what they please without regards to the neighborhood, but a happy medium has to be found.
 
Hmm.. I read it differently...

The developer isn't walking away from the city, Piano is walking away from the developer. If the the city were to blame for the problems I'm sure neither Piano nor Trans National would have hesitated for a moment to point their fingers in that direction.
Who knows for sure what went down, but it sounds like a spat between the developer and architect and it's the city that's getting screwed. :(

edit: That's not to say what you wrote isn't true, I just don't think that was the issue here. It may come up later though.
 
Yeah I think it is just Piano walking away. They probably going to create a new design and rendering. Hopefully this will not be a blow to this tower.
 
Sounds like Piano didn't want to ruin the "integrity" of his box by modifying the structure at all, whether that was incorporating the Rudolph building or making the tower wider. I'm not sure that was very wise.
 
What wasn't wise? Him not accommodating the developer or the developer insisting that he should?
 
Belkin is pushing to increase the width of the tower? Great, just what we need, another Boston heffer, except this one will be much taller.
 
statler said:
What wasn't wise? Him not accommodating the developer or the developer insisting that he should?
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Him not accomodating the developer.
 
Fine with me, I didn't like this design anyway, lets hope for something less boxy.
 
we probably wont be getting something less boxy with CBT taking over as the lead architect
 
It's too bad they couldn't get SOM involved. They aren't a big name like Foster or Piano in the artistic sense, but their stuff more often than not actually comes out looking good and I bet they wouldn't run away crying over petty disagreements with the guy writing the checks.
 
Just for comparison, here's a list of architects competing to build San Francisco's supertall Transbay proposal:


-- Sir Richard Rogers, an English lord whose designs include the Pompidou Center in Paris, would work with Forest City Enterprises -- co-developer of the Westfield San Francisco Centre that opened in September.

-- Another lord, Sir Norman Foster, is paired with The Related Cos. Foster's firm has designed some of the world's most distinctive towers and is working on a new tower at the site of the former World Trade Center.

-- Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava entered the competition with Boston Properties. Calatrava is best-known for bridges but also designed a 2,000-foot condominium tower scheduled to begin construction this year in Chicago. Boston Properties owns the Embarcadero Center office complex.

-- The development firm Hines is allied with Pelli Clarke Pelli. Cesar Pelli designed Petronas Towers in Malaysia -- the world's tallest tower for several years -- as well as 560 Mission in San Francisco. Hines has developed four towers in San Francisco.

-- San Francisco architecture firm Skidmore Owings Merrill, which submitted qualifications in a partnership with Rockefeller Group Development Corp., which is owned by Japan's Mitsubishi Estate Co.

-- And lets not forget our good friend, Renzo Piano.


Why do we always seem to get the short end of the stick? And do you think that had the site been better, we would have gotten equally impressive teams competing over Winthrop Sq? Maybe with more competition the architect wouldn't have been so quick to run away from his proposal.....
 
My personal feelings is it had more to do with Belkin wanting to expand and Menino letting him. This is the same thing as Haliburton getting the contracts to rebuild Iraq. Someone knows someone. End of story.
 
In the 3/26/07 issue of Forbes there is a 14 page advertisment promoting the city of Boston. Along with multiple rederings of the Fan Pier site, the tower at 115 Federal St is mentioned several times as Boston's tallest building. My impression from this is the city wouldn't be putting this in thier ad if they wern't serious about getting the tower built.
 
Boy, the NY Times is sure putting up a full court press for Mr. Rudolph. I'm not saying it's not warranted, but..

Tear this building down. From the outside it's very, very nice but there's little to experience and interact with here. It's a box with some nice detailing, and maybe I'm just ignorant but I don't see anything that's worth standing on the sidewalk studying for more than two minutes. Just take a bunch of pictures for posterity. And I forget who it was here who said so, but apparently there's nothing on the inside worth saving. Maybe CBT can do something nice with it, but I'd rather they put their energy towards creating a better overall design sans this.
 
Like briv, justin, and ablarc, I'm a real fan of Rudolph...After Wright, he was America's master architect, a true craftsman and an excellent teacher (his students include Lord Foster and Robert A.M. Stern)...His work is difficult, and often flawed -- Rudolph was an architectural idealist, and he designed with a worldview that was incompatible with the reality of his time...His uncompromising character is "baked into" the buildings he left us, and these works lack the mutability found in other (more trendy) brands of Modernism...

A building like our oft-maligned Hurley is as hard to love as Anton Webern's music, or the poems of Wallace Stevens; but when you penetrate the ideas behind any challenging work, the rewards are great...

Rudolph's talent was to synthesize the ideas of Wright, Corbu, Mies, Rietveld, and a host of others, to create an architecture of permanence and gravitas equal to the building's purpose, and descendant from historical models (in particular Romanesque and Gothic)...Louis Kahn's work is similar in this respect...

I've done some thinking on the Blue Cross Building...It's a tough nut, an historic building in that it presages the High Tech Expressionism of Foster, Rogers, Piano, and Ken Yeang, but it's a modest building...I was somewhat ambivalent to Piano's proposal -- it seemed too inert, and too much like a David Childs building...I'd love to see a few buildings of this scale (80+ floors) built in Boston, but the Karp/Piano proposal was elegant without being sexy...If construction on the garage site requires the loss of Rudolph's arty little stump, I can only hope its martyrdom leads to the preservation of more worthy buildings like City Hall...

And about Ken Yeang -- I'd love to see what he'd do with this site...
 
Beton Brut said:
A building like our oft-maligned Hurley is as hard to love as Anton Webern's music, or the poems of Wallace Stevens; but when you penetrate the ideas behind any challenging work, the rewards are great...
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Agreed in principle, but i have to disagree with this statement in part. The Hurley is not especially hard to take from the city hall side. the garden / open courtyard is, for me, elegant.

that said, the beacon hill side seems mediocre and the west end side, while fanciful, seems near actionable from the point of view of the neighboring streetscapes... so a mixed bag, but with real highlights, imho.

(also, though, i'll admit to being an unqualified armchair quarterback).
 
I bet if the same building was in New York and sitting on the site of a proposed super tall it would have been demolished all ready.
 
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