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Stuck in Opening Day traffic on Storrow today
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I walked by this on Bay State Road and it's difficult to capture how imposing this is. Made me feel uneasy, and I was enthusiastically a fan of this building. I still think it looks hot from the river, looking down Comm Ave from Allston, but gotta say it kinda sucks up close.
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I really wish they would extend the glass and ribbing (or at least the ribbing) up another level to better conceal the mechanicals on top. I see this building almost every day and I hate that my eyes instinctively go up to the boxes on the roof, just sitting out there in the open all ugly. It's a pretty easy fix that I really hope they can apply before this finishes and opens up. The height is such that the upper levels and rooftop are the most visible parts of this building from pretty much everywhere but on the street.
 
Saw this nugget on the Boston subreddit (thread):

"I'm building the facade. A few interesting things, birds are flying into the mirrored panels and dying, and the glare off them is so burning hot it burns through styrofoam type insulation and waterproofing membrane. I don't think hanging out on the terraces will be as enjoyable as the architect intended."
 
In my opinion, the designers of this building committed huge blunders by 1.) incorporating so many different exterior finishes onto this facade and 2.) treating the building's exterior as a collection of two-dimensional planes rather than three-dimensional volumes. The whole precariously-stacked-boxes effect is ruined because each side of each box has a different finish, so it no longer even reads as a cohesive 3D object. What we're left with, visually, is a busy mess of a building.
 
Beantropolis said:
In my opinion, the designers of this building committed huge blunders by 1.) incorporating so many different exterior finishes onto this facade and 2.) treating the building's exterior as a collection of two-dimensional planes rather than three-dimensional volumes. The whole precariously-stacked-boxes effect is ruined because each side of each box has a different finish, so it no longer even reads as a cohesive 3D object. What we're left with, visually, is a busy mess of a building.
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Finally someone wrote what I was thinking, only I couldn't articulate it as well as Beantropolis. I was beginning to cheer the building on as the stacks grew, until the facades went on. I thought, okay, maybe this is limited to a story or two....but no.
 
Beantropolis said:
In my opinion, the designers of this building committed huge blunders by 1.) incorporating so many different exterior finishes onto this facade and 2.) treating the building's exterior as a collection of two-dimensional planes rather than three-dimensional volumes. The whole precariously-stacked-boxes effect is ruined because each side of each box has a different finish, so it no longer even reads as a cohesive 3D object. What we're left with, visually, is a busy mess of a building.
Click to expand...
Deliberate ugliness would seem to be what the architects of this building were striving for, and they certainly succeeded. Not to wax too philosophical here, but this trend of deliberate ugliness, IMO, comes from a loss of hope and a despair over the decline of civilization. At least that's the statement this awful building conveys.
 
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