The Hub on Causeway (née TD Garden Towers) | 80 Causeway Street | West End

They had the office tower down. Should have used their time to make the residential into something nice.
 
BostonDrew said:
Why not 'carve out' the bump out and 'reveal' the same facade pattern as the rest of the tower
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They should do this and add 2 more floors at the top so make up for the lost space. This would also be enough to barely break the total plateau effect this complex, plus the longfellow tower, plus the existing avalon NS are going to have on the area. The problem is, when height is the ultimate boogeyman, everything comes out fat and overbearing.

Aside from the podiums, this whole complex is going to challenge for the biggest POS in the city.
 
Is this really designed by Gensler? Because this is literally the opposite of what Gensler usually designs.
 
KentXie said:
Is this really designed by Gensler? Because this is literally the opposite of what Gensler usually designs.
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Yes it is. And it's pretty par for the course for Gensler, imho. They design pretty awful "architecture."
 
A lot of visible progress here over the weekend: forms are back on the Phase II core and another form level has been assembled for the residential/hotel tower. [webcam]

Going up!
 
I'm no architect, but doesn't it say something bad about the effort that went into this building that when complaints were made about the design and the response was to move around pieces of the façade like it were a Mr. Potato Head?

With Winthrop Square, it looks like there was some real thought that went into the changes...even in the universally-panned design that was mercifully abandoned. With this, it feels like a guy was standing at the front of the room with a model of the building and said "Don't like this one, huh? Ok...well...**moves in front of the model, blocking it from view, and frantically starts moving pieces around**...how...about........this?!"
 
tmac9wr said:
I'm no architect, but doesn't it say something bad about the effort that went into this building that when complaints were made about the design and the response was to move around pieces of the façade like it were a Mr. Potato Head?

With Winthrop Square, it looks like there was some real thought that went into the changes...even in the universally-panned design that was mercifully abandoned. With this, it feels like a guy was standing at the front of the room with a model of the building and said "Don't like this one, huh? Ok...well...**moves in front of the model, blocking it from view, and frantically starts moving pieces around**...how...about........this?!"
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It's like a restaurant kitchen getting a meal sent back because it's undercooked and overseasoned, so they just replate it a little differently and send it back out.

There's now new garnish on the potatoes but the chicken is still raw and salty.
 
Just want to put this in perspective: doing a full redesign like 115 Winthrop is expensive (both in design and production of documents) and significantly delays the schedule (which comes back to expensive because time = money). I can understand why they're trying to hang on with this scheme by grasping at straws, but it's really not a scheme worth holding onto and hopefully the BCDC gets them to see this. They have to get this right, especially if they want this to be a "gateway" to the City.
 
Get rid of the second podium, get rid of the cutouts/balconies, make it skinnier and add a couple floors to make up for the loss in footage. It won't turn any heads but there, just saved a dozen sheets of envelope details and one-off corner conditions and whatever it would have cost to produce them. I will accept checks, glad we had this talk.
 
I actually really like Options 4/4B. Put a spire on it, and build it.
 
datadyne007 said:
Just want to put this in perspective: doing a full redesign like 115 Winthrop is expensive (both in design and production of documents) and significantly delays the schedule (which comes back to expensive because time = money). I can understand why they're trying to hang on with this scheme by grasping at straws, but it's really not a scheme worth holding onto and hopefully the BCDC gets them to see this. They have to get this right, especially if they want this to be a "gateway" to the City.
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Good point. I didn't take that into consideration. It is very, very strange that they themselves are promoting this as the "Gateway" but are totally fine using this design for it.
 
JumboBuc said:
It's like a restaurant kitchen getting a meal sent back because it's undercooked and overseasoned, so they just replate it a little differently and send it back out.

There's now new garnish on the potatoes but the chicken is still raw and salty.
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....and they didn't hock a new lunger into the dish this time, because they already did with the previous iteration.
 
shmessy said:
....and they didn't hock a new lunger into the dish this time, because they already did with the previous iteration.
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Hahaha, lunger or the proper lungah, a word I hadn't heard in freaking years, it must be indigenous to the Boston area! In all the years since I moved away to Florida and now Atlanta, I've never heard that term used, evah! Thanks for the laugh, Shmessy!
 
I gotta say that after spending the week in NY and staying near the Hudson Yards project, the Garden development looks a lot better to me now. The scale of the Hudson Yards project is highly impressive, and the buildings are decent enough, but they are all soulless boring glass towers.
 
type001 said:
The scale of the Hudson Yards project is highly impressive, and the buildings are decent enough, but they are all soulless boring glass towers.
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There's a neo-futurist vibe to the Holl's entire scheme, Fritz Lang meets Constantin Brâncuși. The scale is intimidating, but I find the boldness of the forms, and the total impact of the single-minded composition really inspiring.

Posted to insight conversation:
https://chicago.curbed.com/2018/3/16/17121148/chicago-supertall-skyscraper-architecture

Ignore the scale and height. Consider the forms, proportions, and the range of expression in these schemes. What can we learn here? And how can it help us move the BPDA and BCDC toward raising the bar for developers and designers?
 
Chicago is the city of the big shoulders, and these projects you linked to are an heir to that heritage. Boston has been a bit prissy and provincial by comparison.

The two closest towers in this one would have fit nicely for the Hub on Causeway:

725_Randolph_Hero.jpg
 
I think on display is the one thing we continue to get wrong here: no matter what the scale, a slender proportion is more appealing. I understand that beyond the [literally] superficial, a tower is the result of the interplay among a number of conditions--geologic, financial, political. And I wonder whether there's something that developers' spreadsheets know that we don't, that necessitates our pudgy high rises. But it doesn't seem like it has to be this way.

Developers are within their rights to conceive of buildings as machines for making money, but the city is supposed to act as an extension of the public's will to suppress that impulse in service of other goals (e.g., civic beauty). We are collectively too smart to just throw our hands up and say it's impossible to make money on skinny buildings.
 
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