South Station Tower | South Station Air Rights | Downtown

Bos77 said:
I wonder if he actually had any input on the project? This project has been around for so long, and so many iterations, but he died in 2019. The firm itself has an above average amount of rinse and repeat corporate fare: Salesforce - San Francisco, ICF - Hong Kong, Grand Torre - Santiago, 30 Hudson - Jersey City, and on and on. You get a Pelli, and YOU get a Pelli! This definitely speaks much of the same language as those others. Sadly will not make it a visually memorable project despite the amazing engineering that is happening. One Congress on the other hand...
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Hasn't this been the design for quite some time? Other than the version with the spire, there isn't a whole lot of iterations over the development history. And that is a long history.
 
DZH22 said:
Pelli's best work seems to have been from the late 1980's through early 1990's, particularly with Minneapolis' Wells Fargo Center, Cleveland's Key Tower, and Charlotte's Bank of America Tower.
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Isn't Pelli Clarke & Partners and CBT Architects responsible for One Congress? I prefer that tower to the Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Charlotte examples cited. I don't know to what degree Pelli, himself, was involved in that design, but if he was substantially part of the design team, then I'd say *that* is his best work.
 
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chrisbrat said:
Isn't Pelli Clarke & Partners and CBT Architects responsible for One Congress? I prefer that to the Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Charlotte examples cited. I don't know to what degree Pelli, himself, was involved in that design, but if he was substantially part of the design team, then I'd say *that* is his best work.
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This is an oversight on my part as One Congress is absolutely spectacular. It's too bad our "Boston scaled" Pelli towers couldn't be more on par with those in Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Charlotte. To be fair using the below diagram, One Congress is underdrawn by 11'.

1673561582697.png
 
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DZH22 said:
t's too bad our "Boston scaled" Pelli towers couldn't be more on par with those in Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Charlotte.
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Better than the Pinnacle Tower in Nashville, which is neither 'Boston scaled' or a Pelli, but clearly a ripoff inspired by. :p
 
DZH22 said:
This is an oversight on my part as One Congress is absolutely spectacular. It's too bad our "Boston scaled" Pelli towers couldn't be more on par with those in Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Charlotte. To be fair using the below diagram, One Congress is underdrawn by 11'.

View attachment 32920
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To be honest, I think Boston clearly won out on this comparison. The first two look like cheap ESB knock-offs, and the third has god awful massing.
 
HenryAlan said:
To be honest, I think Boston clearly won out on this comparison. The first two look like cheap ESB knock-offs, and the third has god awful massing.
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First 2 are spectacular buildings in person, especially the Cleveland one. For the third one let's look at it another way.... Take that wide bottom section that tops around 230', remove the rest of the tower on top, and then plop that wide blob directly in front of the money view of One Congress. In fact, the POS lab we're going to get will probably be even wider than that. So a 775' that tapers towards the top has "god awful massing" yet is probably less wide than half the buildings we get nowadays, except ours are only about 30% as tall.

Honestly, I think this massing is pretty decent, and the tower is spectacular.

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Yeah, but in addition to being taller than what we get around these parts, it's (gasp!) aggressively, gorgeously lit up at night!

Noooooo! Won't someone think of the birds and the folks who can't sleep because -- get ready for a shocker -- cities aren't pitch-black at night (and who apparently have never heard of curtains)?!?!?
 
HenryAlan said:
To be honest, I think Boston clearly won out on this comparison. The first two look like cheap ESB knock-offs, and the third has god awful massing.
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I will say they did choose the most flattering angles for the State Street and SS towers. Especially on State Street, just rotate that a bit and the massing become quite a bit less slender as the picture implies.
 
bakgwailo said:
I will say they did choose the most flattering angles for the State Street and SS towers. Especially on State Street, just rotate that a bit and the massing become quite a bit less slender as the picture implies.
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Yes this is the other point I forgot to make... Both One Congress and South Station Tower are probably just as wide as the Wells Fargo, yet substantially shorter! State Street makes Verizon look positively svelte from the North.
 
chrisbrat said:
Yeah, but in addition to being taller than what we get around these parts, it's (gasp!) aggressively, gorgeously lit up at night!

Noooooo! Won't someone think of the birds and the folks who can't sleep because -- get ready for a shocker -- cities aren't pitch-black at night (and who apparently have never heard of curtains)?!?!?
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The irony is that the Wells Fargo Building in Minneapolis turns its decorative lights off specifically to address the problem of disorienting birds:

Lights Out Twin Cities

www.dnr.state.mn.us www.dnr.state.mn.us
 
HenryAlan said:
To be honest, I think Boston clearly won out on this comparison. The first two look like cheap ESB knock-offs, and the third has god awful massing.
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I’m in CLT fairly often and think that tower looks stunning in person. Calling it an ESB knockoff is wildly unfair.
 
Mod's Update: Turns out SST is a Rorschach test in which people see other topics. I wonder if that was in the design brief. To try to tame this beast, I have moved some content from here to other threads. If your (frequently-brilliant) rejoinders seem missing here, please look for them by alternate topic at:
And depending how deep we get into bird-strike guano, it may have to find a killer-windmill thread to merge into :p Thank you for your patience.
 
Coming in late here, but FWIW, I live in the Twin Cities and the Wells Fargo building is really special - up close it is well made, not cheap at all at street level, and from a distance, it looks both classic and modern - and looks great lit up at night (unlike the Capella Tower next door).
 
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