Boston Skyline

Paris Skyline:
Paris%20Skyline1184459090-800x600.jpg

"Paris Skyline Wallpaper" by TheLeggett

Prague Skyline:
PragueFromStVitusCathedral.jpg


Maybe someday they will be world class cities.
 
^ You forgot Budapest, Vienna, Amsterdam, Florence and Venice --all world class cities. It's too late for Boston to take their road, as I'm sure you're aware, statler --unless you tear down most of the skyscrapers. World-class cities that more closely resemble Boston in that they feature a mix of low and high rise include London, Barcelona, Berlin, Madrid, Montreal and Moscow --all admirable places.

No, the high-rises are here; might as well make the best of it.
 
Tempting... I think I like list A better than list B.

Leave the Hancock and the Custom House as our Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe.
 
The tower third from the right...

is that london bridge tower or moscow tower or something else?

I love London bridge tower. I would give anything to have it in Boston. Instead renzo gave us a box :(
 
paris has skyscrapers too ya know..so that picture you call the "skyline" is the equivelant of taking a picture of dorchester and calling it bostons skyline. Of course, maybe its just because paris's towers are so hideous you didnt want to scar us :p.
 
I was at a planning meeting once and someone criticized the "high spine" idea as building a wall between the back bay and south end. I was pretty sympathetic to this criticism and though that high rises should be limited to downtown and the Prudential area. But this picture is the first time I've seen a representation of it that shows how cool it could be.
 
Patriots_1228 said:
paris has skyscrapers too ya know..so that picture you call the "skyline" is the equivelant of taking a picture of dorchester and calling it bostons skyline. Of course, maybe its just because paris's towers are so hideous you didnt want to scar us :p.
Click to expand...
To be fair, most Paris skyscrapers are herded into clumps either outside the city limits (La Defense) or near the periphery (Quai Javel, Porte Maillot, etc.). The big, bad, never-to-be-repeated exception that ruins so many views is Tour Montparnasse.

Paris' towers aren't really either more or less hideous than those of Boston or most other cities. The ratio tends to be one good tower to roughly five bad ones.
 
From Wiki:

Hancock Place. 790 ft., 60 stories, 1976. 162nd-tallest building in the world, 46th-tallest in the U.S. Has been the tallest building in Boston and New England since 1976. More commonly known as John Hancock Tower. Tallest building in Boston constructed in the 1970s.

Prudential Tower. 749ft., 52 stories, 1964. 70th-tallest building in the U.S. The Skywalk, the highest observation deck in New England, is located on the building's 50th floor. Tallest building in the city constructed in the 1960s.

Neglects to mention that when built, Pru was the tallest building in the world outside New York. That was a decade when Boston was a major hot spot on the international architectural map. Definitely world class.

No longer.
 
To be fair, most of the towers you added into the above illustration aren't the kind of architecture that would make any city an "architectural hotspot". They're the glitzy commercial schmalz that typified the late boom, and some of the examples from London may never even be built (certainly some of those slated for here won't be).

Nor was the Pru ever considered much of a masterpiece, despite its dizzying height, at the time - Boston had this reputation because of Rudolph, Pei, Saarinen and Corbusier.
 
... and at least equally the now much-maligned J.L. Sert and Kallmann and McKinnell ... and the now virtually forgotten Ben Thompson, svengali of Quincy Market and Design Research.

And add Cambridge Seven to your list; both the Aquarium and the T's new look (now altered beyond recognition) made them international celebrities.

Stir in Gropius and TAC, and shake well for a potent cocktail.
 
ablarc said:
To be fair, most Paris skyscrapers are herded into clumps either outside the city limits (La Defense) or near the periphery (Quai Javel, Porte Maillot, etc.). The big, bad, never-to-be-repeated exception that ruins so many views is Tour Montparnasse.

Paris' towers aren't really either more or less hideous than those of Boston or most other cities. The ratio tends to be one good tower to roughly five bad ones.
Click to expand...

true true. I just couldn't stop thinking about that big ugly box thing lol. Tom Montparnasse is actually a cool tower IMO, just would look better in say manhattan or chicago than the middle of paris.
 
Sorry for being cryptic, ablarc. I was refering to your original photoshopped Boston skyline. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I took your point to be: wouldn't Boston's skyline be much better if it were peppered with towers like the kewl new ones from around the world. If that's your point, my question was: how is your choice of towers and their locations meant to improve Boston specifically? Wouldn't the same remedy apply to a generic city with a blah skyline? If so, does the path to excellence go through genericity?

justin
 
^ Since any prescription you write for a place is likely to exist elsewhere, you could say all prescriptions are generic. When Boston boosted itself into the top ranks of skyscraper cities with the Prudential Tower (then the world's tallest outside New York), was Boston aping New York? Is your boulevard prescription for Central Square generically Parisian? Wouldn't it also work in Philadelphia (oh, they already did it there)?

Genuine originality is so elusive that it might be a unicorn.
 
These ideas, though, always have a twist. Since the construction of the Pru, Boston developed the idea of the High Spine, and the view of the Back Bay skyline - with background skyscrapers rising along the river behind elegant rowhouses - one of the city's most genial. Likewise the nicely-balanced harbor view of the skyline from the Moakley Courthouse, which takes advantage of the curve in the Shawmut Peninsula. And then there is the vaunted brown-red "palette" of the city. I've criticized Rowes Wharf for garishness, but it's almost impossible to imagine its neo-Bulfinchian monumentality in a city other than Boston. Even the Hancock tower, considered an alien intervention, is now celebrated primarily for harmonizing with the city's history.

Can we say the same for the rubbish-heap of late capitalism that comprised the planning board for pre-recession London?
 
^Agreed. Ablarc, what I had in mind was site-specificity rather than originality.,

justin
 
A skyline is a resultant of site-specific decisions. Those can be good or bad.

Those are uppermost in all our minds, since the city is most meaningfully experienced from street level.

Nobody sets out specifically to design a skyline --not even in Pudong or Dubai; yet skylines result nonetheless and can be appreciated as entities, some of which are better than others.

The ones that don't fuse their components into a Table Mountain mass are generally more pleasing in distant views. That's all.
 
ablarc said:
Actually, when we react to a skyline, we?re assessing scale or relative size, not absolute magnitude. In other words, we?re comparing the size of things. So it?s the size disparity between buildings that makes us feel awe at the size of the big ones.
Click to expand...

Bingo. I think a lot of people (especially on this board) think Boston's skyline isn't that impressive because the buildings aren't significant in height. I disagree. Boston has a lot of 450 foot + buildings, and that's the problem. They are all around the same size so when your eye looks upon the skyline, it goes right to the cluster of buildings. These buildings being so close in size, gives the illusion to your eye (and brain) that they're not as big as they are. The picture of the New York skyline that you posted illustrates that perfectly.

I really like the picture you doctored because it shows that a few taller, and different style buildings makes the skyline a lot more appealing to the eyes. Very good post Albarc, you are becoming my favorite poster on this site. Very though provoking.
 
I think most people on here know that more goes into a city than just it?s skyline. That is most certain. But a skyline is a check mark (on a long list) that rates a city. Either you got a good one or you got an ok one, or you don?t got one. A city can still be awesome with out one, but to have one is all the more power. And no matter what you say, Manhattan would not be Manhattan with out its towers, which as a by product creates the highest density in the world. Ablarc show?s that with some nice punctuating tall boys we could go from having a solid sky line, to a real phenomenal one.
 
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