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

[George_Apley]

Really liking those shots from Charlestown. That view has changed so much so fast.

 

[dotdude78]

Ugh. Such a fat, boxy turd of a building.

 

[George_Apley]

I think the slight setback just above the glass will make this much better than you're thinking. It's hard to see currently due to the bare steel and the screen, but it will make a difference for the finished tower.

 

[Vagabond]

Really liking those shots from Charlestown. That view has changed so much so fast.

Really liking those shots from Charlestown. That view has changed so much so fast.

I love the new view every time I come into town, and like the industrial design, even though it probably should be taller. The fat boxy turd is the Garden - this project has created a whole new visual dynamic that will draw eyes upward (but hopefully not off the road...). Even something as simple as creative building illumination I believe will help obscure the glass bellyband that Verizon wanted. Between this and the Lovejoy building, these building at least draw the eyes, instead of that godawful Courtyard Marriott that is front and center once you get on the bridge. Very excited to see the results of this project.

 

[odurandina]

Ugh. Such a fat, boxy turd of a building.

Typical 980' NYC office tower.
If only they could've pulled off 250' of residential up top.

 

[whighlander]

“A New Boston Sports Bar Houses The Largest LED Screen In The East Coast!”

“The largest LED tv screen in the east coast is located right around the corner from the TD Garden. Dubbed the "Dream Screen" the tv is 39.5-foot diagonal LED television that is claimed to be the largest on-screen sports viewing experience in the city of Boston.”
Link

-I think its safe to say that this has been a MASSIVE success, and still more parts to come. This has actually made this end of the city THE place to be for games, and soon with the food hall, concert hall, theater... the place to be in general. What an incredible addition this is and Boston is a better city because of it.

Banners Kitchen & Tap, Boston’s New Immersive Sports Bar At The Hub On Causeway, Celebrates Opening To Public Today

Banners Kitchen & Tap, Boston’s New Immersive Sports Bar At The Hub On Causeway, Celebrates Opening To Public Today | Mass Brew Bros

massbrewbros.com

PRESS RELEASE / October 15, 2019 (Boston, MA) – Patina Restaurant Group announced today that its latest restaurant concept, Banners Kitchen & Tap, will open at 4 p.m. today to the public.

This new immersive sports bar will open its doors at The Hub on Causeway, the joint-venture development by Delaware North and Boston Properties located in the heart of Boston sports, on the former site of the Boston Garden and adjacent to the TD Garden and North Station. Banners is named in honor of the Bruins and Celtics championship banners raised to the rafters over the last several decades.

The 25,000-square foot bar and restaurant features a menu developed by Patina Restaurant Group’s Boston Culinary Director Jacqueline Kelly, showcasing menu items that offer new takes on sports bar staples.

Banners’ guests can enjoy crowd favorites like Banners Chicken Wings, Clothesline Smoked Bacon and BBQ Chili Nachos, and diverse salad and bowl selections like the Chopped O.G. Salad and the Sweet Potato “Noodle” Bowl, to name a few. For guests with big appetites, Banners’ sandwiches, burgers and plates such as the Fat Rooster Fried Chicken Sandwich, NE IPA Battered Fish & Chips and the Double Stack Burger will satisfy any craving. Banners will also add a four-day brunch program to its sports bar atmosphere in the coming months.

Banners will also feature an eclectic beverage program designed by acclaimed bar director Jackson Cannon. Cannon’s take on classic cocktails at some of the best restaurants in Boston (Eastern Standard Kitchen & Drinks, The Hawthorne, Island Creek Oyster Bar) has earned him national and international recognition. Banners is raising the bar with familiar favorites like Espresso Martinis and Moscow Mules that have been elevated with the best ingredients and creative preparations. The menu is built for scale, with a few cocktails on draft – the “Champions Cup,” made with vodka, coconut, lime, banana and bubbly, and “Legends Way,” consisting of bourbon, vermouth, cynar and campari – in addition to providing a selection of large-format cocktails. Cannon has also integrated high-end brands of whiskey that he personally selected with the Banners management team in Kentucky this summer to add to the impressive spirits collection.

Beyond the spirits selection, beer lovers will find Banners to be their new spot for testing local and regional craft beers. Banners has 60 rotating tap lines installed and maintained by Modern Draught, a South Boston-based draft beer system company, making Banners’ beer list one of the largest in Boston. Banners will also be integrated with Untappd, the geosocial networking service and mobile app that allows its users to check what’s on tap in real time, rate beers and further connect with the craft beer community.

Paying homage to the Blades and Boards Club that resided in the Boston Garden from the 1970s to the 1990s is the revitalized Blades & Boards VIP dining experience within Banners Kitchen & Tap. With a steakhouse atmosphere and high-end menu, this reservation-only luxury dining option includes decadent offerings like the Iced Shellfish Tower, Daily Catch A La Plancha, Green Circle Farms Roasted Half Chicken and the 28-Day Dry-Aged Boneless Prime Rib.

In addition to its culinary and beverage appeal, the multilevel restaurant and bar offers patrons the ultimate sports and entertainment destination. With their “Dream Screen,” attendees will watch Boston’s favorite sports teams on a 39.5-foot diagonal LED television, the largest on-screen sports viewing experience in the city of Boston. Throughout Banners, 13 additional “TV tickers” screens and five “banners” with live game scores and stats will be easily accessible for an alternative viewing experience.

Banners Kitchen & Tap’s Topgolf Swing Suite also has three private bays to enjoy golf, hockey, football, baseball, zombie dodgeball and carnival game simulations in a lounge experience with full food and drink service. Each suite can accommodate eight guests for one-hour increments to be reserved on the Banners website.

“We wanted to create an environment that’s fun, high energy and engaging, but with thoughtful choices that make it appealing to neighborhood residents, commuters, families, and both sports fans and non-sports fans alike,” said Don Bailey, director of operations for Patina Restaurant Group in Boston. “It would have been easy to make Banners a standard sports bar – we have the location and audience where that would be a great success – but every choice we made in this process was done to simultaneously pay homage to the ground where we are built, while also raising expectations for the guest experience.”

Banners Kitchen & Tap joins Patina Restaurant Group’s forthcoming Hub Hall, a food hall scheduled to open this winter, in The Hub on Causeway. Patina Restaurant Group also operates dining at the New England Aquarium and is a subsidiary of global hospitality company Delaware North, which owns and operates TD Garden.

For more information, visit www.bannerskitchenandtap.com, or follow along on Instagram at @BannersKitchenTap and Facebook at BannersKitchenTap.

Two keys to this -- its a part of Delaware North [owner / developer of da Gahdn] and there is more to come in the Hub Hall --a food hall opening this winter

 

[Javier]

From Everett Hill

 

[whighlander]

I see they're using a modern expansion pack of the Girder & Panel Building Sets for those facade panels.

DigitalSciGuy -- "ah yes I remember it well" [Maurice Chevalier & Hermione Gingold in Gigi

We met at nine, we met at eight, I was on time, no, you were late
Ah, yes, I remember it well
We dined with friends, we dined alone, a tenor sang, a baritone
Ah, yes, I remember it well

…

Well -- you nailed the late 20th C early 21st C architecture dirty secret -- you put up a steel structure [or even concrete] and then you slap on the particular type of panel to create the particular style with which you are choosing to emulate or the particular type of impression which you seek to trigger

Once Phillip Johnson was a Glass House the ultimate "transparency and form follows function" -- then he was the AT&T "Highboy" and the Palladian Windowed International Place -- based on an "affair with a window sales man/woman" as Robert Campbell observed.

Now its just "Pick the panels from the box" -- but by doing so can you still make a good building?

or as Witold Rybczynski has written in
What Exactly Makes a Building Memorable?
Architecture, if it’s any good, speaks to all of us. Still, you might need a phrase book or a user’s manual to help you navigates the world of buildings.
Witold Rybczynski
excerpted from Witold Rybczynski’s book How Architecture Works: A Humanist Toolkit (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux)

What Exactly Makes a Building Memorable? - Metropolis

Architecture, if it’s any good, speaks to all of us

www.metropolismag.com

Our cities are full of tall buildings. Skyscrapers have become so ubiquitous that we take them for granted and easily forget what unusual structures they really are, feats of engineering designed to resist major wind forces (and earthquakes), integrating environmental and communications systems, and transporting people quickly and efficiently hundreds of feet into the air. Functionally, nothing could be simpler than an office or apartment tower: repetitive floors stacked up one on top of the other surrounding an elevator core. But skyscrapers represent a thorny architectural problem. For one thing, they are very big. You can stand back and take in the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster in London, just as you would any other building, but a skyscraper is different. ... But actual skyscrapers are much too big to be experienced all of a piece. They are perceived in two quite different ways: from a great distance, as part of the urban skyline, and close up, as part of the street...... The other problem with office towers is their lack of architectural variety. Traditionally, architects have made large buildings interesting compositions by introducing different-size windows, projecting bays, balconies, gables, turrets, dormers, and chimneys. But a high-rise office building consists of floor after floor of un-differentiated space.

......In 1896,....the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan wrote a groundbreaking essay titled “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” Sullivan described skyscrapers as the crude combination of technology (elevators and steel construction) and economics (putting more rentable space on a building lot). “How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration, this stark, staring exclamation of eternal strife, the graciousness of these higher forms of sensibility and culture that rest on the lower and fiercer passions?” he asked in his somewhat flowery prose. His answer, simply put, was to divide the tall building into different parts. The lowest two floors would be richly ornamented and relate visually to the street; the upper floors would express Sullivan’s dictum that “form ever follows function.” He explained: “Above this, throughout the indefinite number of typical office tiers, we take our cue from the individual cell, which requires a window with its separating pier, its sill and lintel, and we, without more ado, make them look all alike because they are all alike.” He also suggested that the top of the building should be finished off with an attic floor, a frieze, or a large cornice, to indicate that the tiers of offices had definitely come to an end.......Sullivan’s tripartite formula, based on a classical sense of architectural order, influenced many later skyscrapers......

Modern tall buildings can still be loosely categorized as either classical or Gothic, depending on how they deal with structure.... These three buildings [Comcast Center by Robert Stern, Hongkong Bank by Norman Foster, New York Times Building by Renzo Piano] are corporate symbols as well as workplaces. The sleek glass Comcast Center, as smooth—and as mute—as a computer chip, houses a high-tech communications company; the façade of the Hongkong Bank is uniformly matte gray, like a banker’s pinstriped suit; and the New York Times Building, home of the nation’s newspaper of record, emphasizes openness and transparency. Symbolism in corporate towers is a reminder that large commercial buildings are not expressions of an architect’s personal vision. Of course, Stern’s interest in history, Foster’s fascination with technology, and Piano’s respect for craftsmanship influence their respective designs. But these buildings also have a lot to say about the corporations that built them, and even more about the societies that built them..... The three skyscrapers are also a reminder that while buildings respond to economic and cultural forces, they are primarily local. They are built in specific cities—Philadelphia, Hong Kong, New York—and they respond to their urban surroundings. They also occupy distinctly different sites..... The three skyscrapers demonstrate how differently different architects use similar materials. The all-glass skin of the Comcast Center is stretched tautly across the façade; two different kinds of glass—one more and one less transparent—define the obelisk. The glass wall of the Hongkong Bank, by contrast, is seen through a steel filigree, whose large and small structural components create a rich and deeply articulated façade. The all-glass New York Times Building is cloaked in sunscreens. The way that these architects handle details is different, too. Stern’s details are elegant but don’t call attention to themselves. Foster makes details that are smooth and precise, like a luxury automobile. Piano’s details tend to be articulated, beautifully crafted nuts and bolts.....

We often describe exciting new buildings as unique and fresh. Indeed, to say that a building is groundbreaking has become the highest form of praise, as if architecture, like fashion, should avoid any reference to the past. Yet, as Philip Johnson wisely observed, “you cannot not know history.” I can’t look at the Comcast Center without thinking of the ancient Egyptian monument whose form it mimics. When I first saw the Hongkong Bank it reminded me of Victorian engineering and steel railroad bridges. The New York Times Building makes me think of the nearby Seagram Building, and how, by simply adding a sunscreen, Piano altered Mies’s classic steel-and-glass idiom. None of these three buildings can be described as historicist, yet none can escape history.

 

[odurandina]

a few lines in, realized, 'ah yes, Whigh doth posted.'
How quickly people un-remember, the iconic limestone facade is but, a razor thin, curtain wall.

 

[DigitalSciGuy]

Yeah, my joking aside about the facade, the quality of the glass and the panels looks great.

But for every reason I can think of, this should've been as tall as originally proposed or even to the FAA-allowable height ceiling. It's a shame we're missing out on an opportunity to have more people working at a major transit hub and office space to address the overall real estate crunch.

Sidebar: the WeWork semi-implosion from their overvaluation has hit my social circles, with an old college friend who had his offer revoked as part of the layoffs (right after he got back from a funemployment break before starting). In spite of this, the market still seems really hot all around (might just be everyone slowly waking up to the fact that WeWork is doing nothing new).

 

[George_Apley]

Sidebar: the WeWork semi-implosion from their overvaluation has hit my social circles, with an old college friend who had his offer revoked as part of the layoffs (right after he got back from a funemployment break before starting). In spite of this, the market still seems really hot all around (might just be everyone slowly waking up to the fact that WeWork is doing nothing new).

The market is a façade though. More and more decoupled from the real economy. Boston is definitely going to be somewhat insulated when a big correction happens, but I don't think the Dow is going to stay at 27,000+ for the long-term.

I'm definitely glad that most of this cycle's big projects like the Hub are already u/c or completed.

 

[whighlander]

Yeah, my joking aside about the facade, the quality of the glass and the panels looks great.

But for every reason I can think of, this should've been as tall as originally proposed or even to the FAA-allowable height ceiling. It's a shame we're missing out on an opportunity to have more people working at a major transit hub and office space to address the overall real estate crunch.

Sidebar: the WeWork semi-implosion from their overvaluation has hit my social circles, with an old college friend who had his offer revoked as part of the layoffs (right after he got back from a funemployment break before starting). In spite of this, the market still seems really hot all around (might just be everyone slowly waking up to the fact that WeWork is doing nothing new).

Don't forget the structure that makes all that possible -- from a couple of weeks ago while walking by the old Bobby Orr statue area enroute to check-out the New Entrance

I happened to pass by some of the raw materials for the project [with their dimensions marked as well as where they go -- kinda like the old building set]

and the entrance area

 

[DZH22]

From 10/8. Click in to view larger.

IMG_6321 by David Z, on Flickr

IMG_6342 by David Z, on Flickr

 

[Javier]

From 93 south

 

[DZH22]

From 10/15.

IMG_7180 by David Z, on Flickr

 

[stick n move]

I have no idea what thats all about. Hopefully theyre cladding over the notch, but thats definitely not whats happening. Maybe its to install the glass barrier and other elements of the outdoor patio in the notch?

 

[Javier]

 

[markhb]

The new NESN Bruins intro features this project completed:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1180227838357704704

 

[whighlander]

1 shot showing -- 4 Cranes perching above 5 Projects at various stages of construction:

1. 2 cranes for Verizon & Rapid 7 at the Hub
2. no cranes for the rest of the Hub finishing
3. 1 crane -- so far -- for the Residences @ the former "Basketball City" parking garage -- former West End
4. 1 Crane for Residences @ Gov't Center Parking Garage
5. 0 cranes -- so far -- for the Once and Future State Street Bank @ Gov't Center Parking Garage
   

 

[ivyhedge]

1 shot showing -- 4 Cranes perching above 5 Projects at various stages of construction:

1. 2 cranes for Verizon & Rapid 7 at the Hub
2. no cranes for the rest of the Hub finishing
3. 1 crane -- so far -- for the Residences @ the former "Basketball City" parking garage -- former West End
4. 1 Crane for Residences @ Gov't Center Parking Garage
5. 0 cranes -- so far -- for the Once and Future State Street Bank @ Gov't Center Parking GarageView attachment 779

We just added a full height (admittedly, not too high) crane in CX today for your viewing pleasure...