bosdevelopment
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Hideous dude.
South Station Tower | South Station Air Rights | Downtown
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lexicon506
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What a let down. The only reason I preferred this design over the original crazy spire one was because it seemed a lot slimmer. Now we end up with the same fat tower except without the spire to at least make it interesting. Pelli should just cut it in half, then it wouldn't be too bad 
TheBostonian
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Between that image and your spying at the BRA, you are a real superstar.
type001
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Maybe the FAA will see how this looks and allow the city to go with the original design afterall. To be honest, it's not horrible looking. However, our expectations have been built up as high as they could possibly go with this tower over the last 9 years or so.
I was still more the original design. Not just because it was 840 feet, but it just looked so different and would have been a great addition to the skyline - a little spire/box balance. But I guess even that design was a fattie too.
I was still more the original design. Not just because it was 840 feet, but it just looked so different and would have been a great addition to the skyline - a little spire/box balance. But I guess even that design was a fattie too.
A new tower "shouldn't be an architectural stunt that could be built anywhere," opined Robert S. Sturgis, former president of the Boston Society of Architects. It should be one that is founded on Boston's roots, conscious of its history but worthy of its future.
Don't they say that about almost every new development in Boston? "This tower here echoes a fat pilgrim's belly and that new tower floats like the whale poop that once littered the Harbor. And that brown box represents what the Boston Box Company use to manufacture in the 1800s."
Joe_Schmoe
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Ha ha ha! Actually, I agree with that statement of Sturgis, but you're right-on in how developers stretch that statement beyond recognition and architects try to be oh so clever in order to get their names recognized.
type001
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I think I might have to change my mind about my feelings about the SST. Even without the spire, it is far from being another box in the Boston skyline. In fact the current design looks way better from the harbor than the original (the spire on the side-view of the original really wasn't that great). At close to 700 feet, SST would be a very noticeable tower even in the mess of the NY skyline.
I am very pleased with this design, as if I'm anyone important
I like it. Its not that wide. If it's 700' it'll be proportioned well enough. And the design may not be off the charts but it still pushes the envelope by Boston standards. This and the Winthrop Square tower will set a new precedent for building in Boston - then hopefully we can get a real world-class skyscraper.
bosdevelopment
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The height is fine. It's just really, really ugly.
dirtywater
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I for one like the design. If I saw only that one rendering posted above, I would not. Even the most graceful building can look fat and ugly from certain perspectives. A dead on shot of the Hancock Tower on its wide side without showing the nuances of the design makes it look fat and pedestrian at best.
I'm not saying this building will be as good as the Hancock Tower, but it is not just a fat building; it has some shape and form that will give it visual impact and, at least from certain angles, an elegance which is not apparent from the rendering posted above. To refresh people's memories, here is a rendering of the building from a much more flattering perspective which appears on the Hines website:
And from this plan (particularly the smaller plan at the bottom showing only the tower) you get a better sense of the shape of the tower - a shape that will give it different looks from different angles and, when seen three dimensionally, will not make the tower seem as fat or monolithic as the rendering that has raised the concern of many makes it appear:
I'm not saying this building will be as good as the Hancock Tower, but it is not just a fat building; it has some shape and form that will give it visual impact and, at least from certain angles, an elegance which is not apparent from the rendering posted above. To refresh people's memories, here is a rendering of the building from a much more flattering perspective which appears on the Hines website:
And from this plan (particularly the smaller plan at the bottom showing only the tower) you get a better sense of the shape of the tower - a shape that will give it different looks from different angles and, when seen three dimensionally, will not make the tower seem as fat or monolithic as the rendering that has raised the concern of many makes it appear:
TheBostonian
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Where does the bus station fit in?
TheBostonian
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http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid29255.aspx
Technopolis lost
A development dream that didn?t come true
By: MARTY D. WOLFAND
12/6/2006 4:48:30 PM
It was a grand vision. Maybe even a noble one. ?TECHNOPOLIS.?
A 30-story, 400-foot, steel and glass ?gossamer tower? that would rise high above South Station, anchoring what the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) dubbed ?a new Southern Gateway to Boston.?
It would house a mighty, world-class, scientific-investigative research engine designed to tackle today?s disease scourges and seek viable pharma treatments and cures for the likes of AIDS, SARS, cancer, the common cold. Also known as the Tufts International Research Center (TIRC), it was intended to be the pre-eminent scientific jewel gracing the city skyline. Its estimated cost: $600 to $700 million.
Technopolis was the shared dream of former Tufts University president John Mayer and former BRA director Stephen Coyle. Mayer believed that Tufts, a small university by Boston?s standards, could find financing and tenants for the new research tower. Coyle, meanwhile, wanted to enhance the South Station transportation hub. ?We want to take the biotechnology part of Boston?s economy beyond the medical research now building in the Longwood Avenue area,? he said when the project launched in 1990.
Sixteen years later, however, the air space above South Station is filled only with cloud castles in the sky.
Since the complex?s inception, its architectural plans have shifted course at least three times. At one point, TIRC was redesigned as the tallest tower in the city, eclipsing even the John Hancock Building by a few feet. Then it was scaled down to become the tallest building in the financial district. Last month, even those bragging-rights were lost when local business-whiz Steve Belkin announced the construction of a huge, new skyscraper on Federal Street, smack in the middle of the financial district.
And it isn?t just Technopolis?s physical structure that has been altered. Its mission has changed dramatically, too. No longer bearing the name of Tufts, the project has morphed ? now nameless ? from a research center into a diluted ?multi-use? space consisting of low- and moderate-income housing, commercial office space, retail and dining establishments, and hotel rooms ? something like a Southie version of Copley Square.
That is, of course, if it is ever built.
Meanwhile, more than $20 million in public and private funds have been poured into the project.
This is an atypical story, one about a big development project that went awry. A key sponsor died. The university that was supposed to anchor it failed to attract the necessary medical-research partners to make it a go. And the building itself faced opposition from community groups and a federal transportation agency, thanks to its enormous scale.
There are no heroes or villains here, really, although there might have been some liberty-taking with taxpayers? money. Rather, this tale concerns a grand vision that gradually slid into the mundane.
Forcing the issue
?This project will remake the face of our city,? claimed former BRA director, Thomas O?Brien, in 1998. And if things had gone according to plan, it would have been true.
At the outset, in 1990, Technopolis/Tufts International Research Center was intended to create a city within the city. Consisting of 500,000 square feet of research space, a 675-room Hilton hotel/conference center, 26,000 square feet of retail space, 12,000 square feet of child-care facilities, a health club, and a 1200-car garage, the finished development ? most of which would be constructed turtle-back-style over the rail lines ? would amount to a massive 2.4 million square feet of space.
Tufts was to anchor the development with 100,000 square feet of university, grant-related research programs. Offices of the federal Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health would also be located there, along with incubating, start-up, biotech ventures.
Spearheading the ambitious project was the inspirational force of John Mayer. Flamboyant, French-born, and an internationally renowned nutritionist, Mayer was the recipient of 14 World War II decorations from his homeland, including the rank of chevalier in the Legion of Honor. While president of Tufts, he acted as a true visionary. He established the only veterinary school in New England and the region?s first graduate school of nutrition, raised the university endowment from $30 million to $200 million, and brought to the Boston medical campus the Human Nutrition Research Center tower, funded by the US Department of Agriculture.
He was a university-builder, no question about it. Mayer ?wasn?t afraid to do things the way he wanted, no matter what,? said Dr. Kenneth Katin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development.
Obsessed with the project, and tirelessly pushing it ? even in the face of resistance by university faculty and staff who believed it was too much for Tufts to handle ? Mayer left the presidency in 1992 to devote himself full-time to Technopolis.
?Perhaps I live in a fool?s paradise, not being a developer,? he noted.
But soon after his departure, Mayer fell ill and was unable to continue his lead role in the project. He died less than a year later, and plans for Technopolis were shelved. The university blamed the lax real-estate market, as well as the ?uncertainty? of federal research dollars and biotech-venture investments.
Reaching for the Heavens
After stagnating for six years, Technopolis was suddenly reinvigorated in 1998. Tufts partnered with a new and very different type of developer than Mayer had been: Hines LLP of Houston, a privately owned real-estate firm with offices in 53 US cities and 10 foreign countries, as well as assets in excess of $8 billion. Soon after their partnership was announced, Tufts and Hines invested $10 million of their own funds, and submitted new plans. But the designs, which still included 430,000 square feet of research space, irritated just about every agency and community group involved, including the BRA.
At issue, in part, was the building?s height. Originally, the tower was to have been 400 feet. Yet the Hines vision for the property incorporated a 760-foot tower, capped by a 150-foot ornamental spire, making it taller than either the Prudential or the Hancock. This idea was destined, as one critic commented at the time, to ?produce an environmental tug of war.? The Chinatown community raised concerns about shadow-length and neighborhood congestion during construction. And the Federal Aviation Administration argued that the height of the main building would pose a commercial-flight hazard. Plus, the medical research planned for the center required a riot of special permits.
Meanwhile, during the project?s fallow years after Mayer?s death, the MBTA made two loans ? one for $3 million, another for $7.1 million ? out of public funds to the Tufts University Development Corporation (TUDC), which still had claim to the South Station air-rights. These funds were to help cover costs related to continuing design and development.
Kim Thurler, Associate Director of Public Relations for Tufts and TUDC, reported that the public-funds loans were let out at 7.01% simple (non-compounded) interest, due to be paid by July 1, 2001, or at the start of construction. Yet, because ground-breaking has not yet happened, TUDC has been in technical default for more than the five years. According to Thomas McGurty, Tufts vice-president for finance and treasurer, as well as president of the for-profit TUDC, the loans are currently being restructured for repayment in 2016.
In spite of its apparent troubles, however, the Technopolis delays are not without precedent. One of the BRA?s longest-standing proposals, according to Lucy Warsh, deputy press secretary for the BRA, was the Archdiocese Rollins Square project in the South End, which opened in 2004.
It was on the BRA?s books for almost 33 years.
Settling down
Today, Technopolis has been whittled down to a permit-able size. Plans now call for a 40-story office tower, a nine-story office building, and a 13-story building that will contain a 200-room hotel and 195,000 square feet of residential space, most of which will be designated ?affordable.? No research space will be involved. David Perry, Hines partner and developer for the South Station venture, says the project will break ground in the second quarter of 2007.
When asked why the BRA stuck with Tufts/TUDC for so long with so little result, Director Mark Maloney said in an e-mail, ?The City and the BRA have kept a strong working relationship through the process with Hines and Tufts; both have good track records with the City.?
Had it been built according to original plans, it would have made a strong contribution to the public good ? not only in Boston but worldwide. Other Boston universities, such as Harvard and Boston University, can?t build new biomedical research space fast enough to accommodate the federal funding and research venture capital that has been pouring into Boston since the early ?90s. And even Tufts has realized a huge increase in those funds, going from a $25 million share in 1996 to $130 million today, according to McGurty.
That money, however, is being dedicated to specific research proposals, mostly on the Tufts Medical Campus. Ultimately, Tufts has been more or less reduced to a nominal bystander in the South Station project, with its developer-partner now largely calling the tune.
When it?s built ? if it?s built ? it will be the ghost of its original inspired design.
Technopolis lost
A development dream that didn?t come true
By: MARTY D. WOLFAND
12/6/2006 4:48:30 PM
It was a grand vision. Maybe even a noble one. ?TECHNOPOLIS.?
A 30-story, 400-foot, steel and glass ?gossamer tower? that would rise high above South Station, anchoring what the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) dubbed ?a new Southern Gateway to Boston.?
It would house a mighty, world-class, scientific-investigative research engine designed to tackle today?s disease scourges and seek viable pharma treatments and cures for the likes of AIDS, SARS, cancer, the common cold. Also known as the Tufts International Research Center (TIRC), it was intended to be the pre-eminent scientific jewel gracing the city skyline. Its estimated cost: $600 to $700 million.
Technopolis was the shared dream of former Tufts University president John Mayer and former BRA director Stephen Coyle. Mayer believed that Tufts, a small university by Boston?s standards, could find financing and tenants for the new research tower. Coyle, meanwhile, wanted to enhance the South Station transportation hub. ?We want to take the biotechnology part of Boston?s economy beyond the medical research now building in the Longwood Avenue area,? he said when the project launched in 1990.
Sixteen years later, however, the air space above South Station is filled only with cloud castles in the sky.
Since the complex?s inception, its architectural plans have shifted course at least three times. At one point, TIRC was redesigned as the tallest tower in the city, eclipsing even the John Hancock Building by a few feet. Then it was scaled down to become the tallest building in the financial district. Last month, even those bragging-rights were lost when local business-whiz Steve Belkin announced the construction of a huge, new skyscraper on Federal Street, smack in the middle of the financial district.
And it isn?t just Technopolis?s physical structure that has been altered. Its mission has changed dramatically, too. No longer bearing the name of Tufts, the project has morphed ? now nameless ? from a research center into a diluted ?multi-use? space consisting of low- and moderate-income housing, commercial office space, retail and dining establishments, and hotel rooms ? something like a Southie version of Copley Square.
That is, of course, if it is ever built.
Meanwhile, more than $20 million in public and private funds have been poured into the project.
This is an atypical story, one about a big development project that went awry. A key sponsor died. The university that was supposed to anchor it failed to attract the necessary medical-research partners to make it a go. And the building itself faced opposition from community groups and a federal transportation agency, thanks to its enormous scale.
There are no heroes or villains here, really, although there might have been some liberty-taking with taxpayers? money. Rather, this tale concerns a grand vision that gradually slid into the mundane.
Forcing the issue
?This project will remake the face of our city,? claimed former BRA director, Thomas O?Brien, in 1998. And if things had gone according to plan, it would have been true.
At the outset, in 1990, Technopolis/Tufts International Research Center was intended to create a city within the city. Consisting of 500,000 square feet of research space, a 675-room Hilton hotel/conference center, 26,000 square feet of retail space, 12,000 square feet of child-care facilities, a health club, and a 1200-car garage, the finished development ? most of which would be constructed turtle-back-style over the rail lines ? would amount to a massive 2.4 million square feet of space.
Tufts was to anchor the development with 100,000 square feet of university, grant-related research programs. Offices of the federal Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health would also be located there, along with incubating, start-up, biotech ventures.
Spearheading the ambitious project was the inspirational force of John Mayer. Flamboyant, French-born, and an internationally renowned nutritionist, Mayer was the recipient of 14 World War II decorations from his homeland, including the rank of chevalier in the Legion of Honor. While president of Tufts, he acted as a true visionary. He established the only veterinary school in New England and the region?s first graduate school of nutrition, raised the university endowment from $30 million to $200 million, and brought to the Boston medical campus the Human Nutrition Research Center tower, funded by the US Department of Agriculture.
He was a university-builder, no question about it. Mayer ?wasn?t afraid to do things the way he wanted, no matter what,? said Dr. Kenneth Katin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development.
Obsessed with the project, and tirelessly pushing it ? even in the face of resistance by university faculty and staff who believed it was too much for Tufts to handle ? Mayer left the presidency in 1992 to devote himself full-time to Technopolis.
?Perhaps I live in a fool?s paradise, not being a developer,? he noted.
But soon after his departure, Mayer fell ill and was unable to continue his lead role in the project. He died less than a year later, and plans for Technopolis were shelved. The university blamed the lax real-estate market, as well as the ?uncertainty? of federal research dollars and biotech-venture investments.
Reaching for the Heavens
After stagnating for six years, Technopolis was suddenly reinvigorated in 1998. Tufts partnered with a new and very different type of developer than Mayer had been: Hines LLP of Houston, a privately owned real-estate firm with offices in 53 US cities and 10 foreign countries, as well as assets in excess of $8 billion. Soon after their partnership was announced, Tufts and Hines invested $10 million of their own funds, and submitted new plans. But the designs, which still included 430,000 square feet of research space, irritated just about every agency and community group involved, including the BRA.
At issue, in part, was the building?s height. Originally, the tower was to have been 400 feet. Yet the Hines vision for the property incorporated a 760-foot tower, capped by a 150-foot ornamental spire, making it taller than either the Prudential or the Hancock. This idea was destined, as one critic commented at the time, to ?produce an environmental tug of war.? The Chinatown community raised concerns about shadow-length and neighborhood congestion during construction. And the Federal Aviation Administration argued that the height of the main building would pose a commercial-flight hazard. Plus, the medical research planned for the center required a riot of special permits.
Meanwhile, during the project?s fallow years after Mayer?s death, the MBTA made two loans ? one for $3 million, another for $7.1 million ? out of public funds to the Tufts University Development Corporation (TUDC), which still had claim to the South Station air-rights. These funds were to help cover costs related to continuing design and development.
Kim Thurler, Associate Director of Public Relations for Tufts and TUDC, reported that the public-funds loans were let out at 7.01% simple (non-compounded) interest, due to be paid by July 1, 2001, or at the start of construction. Yet, because ground-breaking has not yet happened, TUDC has been in technical default for more than the five years. According to Thomas McGurty, Tufts vice-president for finance and treasurer, as well as president of the for-profit TUDC, the loans are currently being restructured for repayment in 2016.
In spite of its apparent troubles, however, the Technopolis delays are not without precedent. One of the BRA?s longest-standing proposals, according to Lucy Warsh, deputy press secretary for the BRA, was the Archdiocese Rollins Square project in the South End, which opened in 2004.
It was on the BRA?s books for almost 33 years.
Settling down
Today, Technopolis has been whittled down to a permit-able size. Plans now call for a 40-story office tower, a nine-story office building, and a 13-story building that will contain a 200-room hotel and 195,000 square feet of residential space, most of which will be designated ?affordable.? No research space will be involved. David Perry, Hines partner and developer for the South Station venture, says the project will break ground in the second quarter of 2007.
When asked why the BRA stuck with Tufts/TUDC for so long with so little result, Director Mark Maloney said in an e-mail, ?The City and the BRA have kept a strong working relationship through the process with Hines and Tufts; both have good track records with the City.?
Had it been built according to original plans, it would have made a strong contribution to the public good ? not only in Boston but worldwide. Other Boston universities, such as Harvard and Boston University, can?t build new biomedical research space fast enough to accommodate the federal funding and research venture capital that has been pouring into Boston since the early ?90s. And even Tufts has realized a huge increase in those funds, going from a $25 million share in 1996 to $130 million today, according to McGurty.
That money, however, is being dedicated to specific research proposals, mostly on the Tufts Medical Campus. Ultimately, Tufts has been more or less reduced to a nominal bystander in the South Station project, with its developer-partner now largely calling the tune.
When it?s built ? if it?s built ? it will be the ghost of its original inspired design.
type001
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Thanks TheBostonian! Very interesting article.
So 07Q2 as Perry is quoted as saying. Cool! As much as I feel for Tufts, I am still psyched that this is planned to break ground soon. What I didn't know is that the original design was to be 30 stories/400 ft. So the new 700 ft tower is definitely an improvement.
I don't think I have ever seen this image before.
It's pretty cool, but I think the new design without the spire is going to look better, especially with 115 in the mix. Once I started seeing the side views of SST with that spire, I realized I didn't like it so much.
So 07Q2 as Perry is quoted as saying. Cool! As much as I feel for Tufts, I am still psyched that this is planned to break ground soon. What I didn't know is that the original design was to be 30 stories/400 ft. So the new 700 ft tower is definitely an improvement.
I don't think I have ever seen this image before.
It's pretty cool, but I think the new design without the spire is going to look better, especially with 115 in the mix. Once I started seeing the side views of SST with that spire, I realized I didn't like it so much.