A 230' fat waste of space? I really liked the design.
It's a small step up from what we are getting in the seaport. Considering those are pretty much the only office buildings being built here, I can see why your standards might have been lowered. However, those are not the kinds of buildings I want to see get built downtown.
They could have done more to fix and activate the plaza.
The view of the Pru from the garden will remain the same, but we will never get the perfect buddy/buddy view of the Pru and 111 that we got from the plaza.
I always bring it back to Philadelphia. Their best "new" tower, and one of the finest skyscrapers ever built, is 1 Liberty Place. Everybody always says the tower looks squat and ill proportioned, but it's because there is no single viewing corridor where you can see it top to bottom. Instead, it is completely surrounded by fat boxes near the 500' mark. So people only see the top and somehow judge the entire building as squat because of it.
Part of the reason the Hancock and Pru are so dominant and soar so much is that there are top to bottom views still available of these buildings. If we surround them by fatties then not only will they look squatter in comparison, but at street level we will lose the "big city" feel that they provide, replacing them with fat 230' boxes.
I can attest that, given the amount I have walked around Boston, the current boom isn't doing the skyline any favors. As somebody mentioned on the Jacob Wirth thread, the end of Stuart/Kneeland streets used to give a view of the Fed and 1 Financial, and now it's the Kensington and Jacob Wirth tower. The downtown looks smaller because the larger buildings are being walled off. Luckily, the next few years should flip the script but for now I will continue to be disappointed as we lose many powerful skyline views from the last 20-30 years. This building is the worst offender. Sorry, but not sorry.
