Boston Building Blog
“Glass Warfare”
Will Boston ever get another tall building that isn’t entirely covered in glass? Specifically, semi-transparent, light blue glass? Given prevailing trends among both architects and developers, and the current lineup of ongoing and approved projects, I am beginning to doubt it. When the 684-foot Millennium Tower opened its blue glass doors on Franklin Street in 2016, it was the tallest new construction in Boston since the John Hancock Tower — one of the genre’s true masterpieces. And yet, in a few short years the “Millennium” Tower will be overtaken by at least two other all-glass buildings and joined by half a dozen more. Observe:
To be clear, these are all of the upcoming highrises in Boston, not just the glass ones¹. It’s possible that some of them won’t get built and those that do will obviously vary in quality. Based on the available renderings, a couple of them may even be rather attractive (my money’s on the main Bulfinch Crossing office tower). The problem isn’t with all-glass buildings per se, but all-glass neighborhoods, skylines, and cities.
Glass (for those unfamiliar with it) is flat, tense, and cold. It has (and, crucially, appears to have) no structural function whatsoever and is featureless save its color or tint and degree of opacity. As a consequence, entire façades of glass — curtain walls with no exterior columns, no (or discrete) mullions, and spandrel glass covering the spaces between floors — tend to be highly abstract and simple to the point of minimalism. Done well, and when juxtaposed with other structures of brick, stone, concrete, or steel, this can produce compositions of unparalleled drama, elegance and beauty. Done poorly or too often², the result is invariably dull, sterile, and alienating.
¹ Actually, there are a couple more that I’ve left out because their current status is still questionable. In case you’re wondering though, they’re all-glass too.
² Obviously, glass isn’t the only material that can suffer from overuse, and buildings clad entirely in titanium or concrete or stone should also be kept to a minimum. Then again, at least since windows became popular, such buildings have generally been limited to art museums and warehouses. By contrast, almost anything can be covered in glass.
Bostonians are no strangers to either of these extremes. As I’ve suggested, there is perhaps no finer example of glass’s potential for drama and grace in my view than the John Hancock Tower. The 60-story monolith is a masterwork of abstract sculpture, as only I. M. Pei & Partners can deliver, but what really makes it sing is its context. Located on Copley Square, framed by the Romanesque Trinity Church, Beaux-Arts Public Library, Art Deco Old Hancock building, and the Back Bay’s Victorian brownstones, its sleek and simple shape, bright primary color, and sheer modernism pop in a way that they just wouldn’t downtown or in lower Manhattan. And it returns the favor, accentuating (indeed, literally reflecting) the solidity, ornamentation, and stateliness of the buildings and neighborhood around it.
Then there’s the Institute of Contemporary Art. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the ICA itself is also a jewel of elegance and simplicity — just a horizontal slab of frosted-glass cantilevered over a translucent box. When it opened in 2006, it was pretty much on its own, standing at the edge of wind-swept empty lots, overlooking the harbor. As the critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote in his review for the New York Times, “the museum reads more as a sculptural object in stunning isolation against the sky than as part of a dense urban composition.” Ouroussoff conceded that this impression was unlikely to last since “a hotel, office building and residential tower [were] planned for the lots flanking the museum,” but he predicted that the ultimate effect would “be even more magical. Viewed through a maze of new buildings, the structure could wield the force of a wonderful surprise.”
Had these new constructions been a mix of handsome brick and stone buildings, not unlike those a block down Seaport Boulevard, the result may well have been wonderfully surprising. Instead, the developers put up a pair of parodically-charmless dark glass boxes better suited for a suburban office park than a metropolitan waterfront. In a different setting (an airport, say) this pair would probably just be tedious, but right behind the ICA they take on an almost dementor-ish quality, sucking the museum’s soul until it looks more like a corporate fitness center than an art institute. Truly, there is no surer way to ruin a glass building than with another.
For much of their history, all-glass towers have been happily limited by their expense and impracticality. However, thanks to a series of technological advances, this is no longer the case³. Glass has become such a versatile and inexpensive material that today the principal limiting factors on its use — other than, you know, taste, urbanism, and the civic virtue s— are the demands of clients and tenants, for many of whom all-glass buildings have become synonymous (not unreasonably) with modernity, luxury, and natural light. That skilled and thoughtful designers can deliver all of these qualities without covering every exterior surface in panes of molten silica is beside the point. Glass facades are the 21st century Greek column — a cheap and easy way to make something look expensive. And unsurprisingly, they have flourished.
Despite the dizzying eclecticism in architecture as a whole, skyscraper design has been mired in an unmistakable blue period for over two decades. Obviously, this trend (or the “Childs-Pelli Effect”?) is difficult to quantify. Still, consider the following. In 2000, the tallest all-glass building in the world was arguably the Bank of China in Hong Kong⁴. Today, without even counting borderline cases like the Burj Khalifa and Tai Pei 101, it ranks about 16th worldwide and barely cracks the top ten in China! And this phenomenon is truly global. Going in alphabetical order (and leaving many cities out) a blue-ish glass skyscraper is now the tallest building in: Abu Dhabi, Bangkok, Calgary, Dallas, Edmonton, Fort Worth, Guangzhou, Hong Kong (& Hanoi), Istanbul, Jakarta, Kuwait City, London (& Los Angeles), Moscow (& Madrid & Milan), New York, Osaka, Philadelphia (& Pyong Yang!), Qingdao, Riyadh, Shang Hai, (& San Francisco & Santiago), Turin, Unavailable (seriously, no cities starts with U), Vancouver, Warsaw, Xiamen, Yekaterinburg, and Zurich.
New York City, the arguable birthplace of the glass skyscraper, has actually been pretty restrained on this front. Give it time though. Blue boxes will continue to rise at the new World Trade Center, along increasingly arborescent 57th Street, and from dozen of available lots throughout midtown. But all of this is really a sideshow to the azure city being constructed between 30th and 34th streets west of 10th Avenue — Hudson Yards. The individual towers making up this twenty-eight acre, twelve-million square foot Xanadu were designed by a mix of different firms and will be a mix aesthetically: some interesting ideas, few risks, no obvious eyesores. (Alas, the SOM skyscrapers that Ada Louise Huxtable described in her 2008 review as looking “alarmingly like sex toys” seem to have been cut.) In the end though, I suspect it won’t matter since these buildings will never be read individually. Packed together and draped in the same shiny blue material, they’ll form a single, undifferentiated mass, which can be fine, but without any coherence in style or composition (as there is, say, at the World Financial Center and sort of is at the New World Trade Center⁵) I’m sure the result will be what it usually is when this happens: a sterile hodgepodge, somehow both cacophonous and boring.
³Actually, it’s still pretty inefficient.
⁴ I say arguably because “all-glass” is not a precise term and some people might apply it to the slightly taller Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai. To me, the aluminum alloy latticework disqualifies it, but I’ve alway been pretty generous.
⁵ Which were designed by whom? César Pelli and David Childs! #PelliChildsEffect
While no city is immune from this pandemic, Boston is in particular danger since, at least for an American city of its size, it has relatively few highrises and many underbuilt neighborhoods. Today, the Hub only has 16 buildings taller than 500 feet, 6 taller than 600 feet, 2 taller than 700 feet, and nothing above 800 feet. Those totals fall well short of those for the towns in Boston’s approximate weight class — viz. San Francisco (21, 8, 5, and 4), Atlanta (18, 11, 5, and 3); and Miami (42, 14, 3, and 1) — and leave the skyline vulnerable to sudden and radical transformations. If just six of the currently-proposed projects are completed, 8 of the city’s 10 tallest buildings will be glass boxes by 2020. Closer to the ground, all-glass mid-rises may soon (or already have begun to) dominate neighborhoods like Kendall Square, the Seaport, and Fenway, where the existing buildings are too small and too few to provide a meaningful counterpoint. Before long, and unless something is done, our fair city will be less of an Eden on the Charles and more of a Charles Yards.
Which brings us to the news, recently reported in the Boston Globe, that the owners of One Post Office Square (One P.O.S.) plan to replace the 40-story office building’s entire pre-cast concrete facade with (you guessed it) shiny blue glass. In addition to re-siding it, the project will fill in some of the tower’s setbacks, adding over 100,000 square feet of floor space and widening its profile a bit. In other words, not only is Boston not going get any new some-glass (i.e., not ‘all-glass’) highrises in the near future, but it’s actually going to lose one.
To be fair, as an individual piece of architecture, One Post Office Square is about as lovely as its name . The architect was Jung Brannen Associates, a former Boston-based firm, now part of the healthcare-design giant TRO, which was responsible for several skyscrapers downtown, including 125 High Street (a personal favorite) and the State Street Financial Center (a personal bête noire). One P.O.S. is an earlier and far less ambitious (or conspicuous) work than those two projects. Though it was opened in 1981, it is a clear holdover from the 70s, among the last of the unreformed gray boxes. Its style might be described as light-brutalism, which has all the charm of light jazz. The exposed-aggregate concrete panels in which it is (currently) clad are more characteristic of a hospital or parking garage than a skyscraper. The massing is a bit haphazard and the façade composition is at once messy and dull. (Major contributors to the mess are the windows, which begin and end as squares, but morph into narrow slits in the middle, ruining what could have been a rather pleasant checkerboard pattern.) The tower’s most interesting features are its cut-in corners and inverted setbacks, which create shallow overhangs reminiscent of Waterside Plaza, but this too is a bit half-hearted. Otherwise, One P.O.S. is a bore.
However, that’s not the point. One P.O.S. doesn’t need to be bold or beautiful. It is a quintessential background building, whose main aesthetic obligation is to fill a space in the skyline and lend weight and solidity to the downtown without calling excessive attention to itself. And like many unassuming, and even mediocre, grey boxes — but unlike even the finest shiny blue ones — it accomplishes these worthy goals with ease. Boston is a city of concrete, stone and, god-knows, brick. It is rough and solid and dark. This is why glass often looks so good here, but it’s not a permanent condition. In an October issue of the Boston Business Journal, an actual tenant of One P.O.S. was quoted as saying that “[t]he recladding and reskinning of this building with a glass component is going to be special for this location … It’s really going to stand out.” This might be true now, but I suspect it won’t be when the project is completed, much less five or ten years later when it is surrounded by a dozen vitreous clones.
To be clear, I have no problem with One P.O.S getting a makeover. It’s not the original Penn Station, and I have no doubt that the people who work there will appreciate the improved views and increased natural light. Nor do I mind additions being made to the skyline or old neighborhoods being redeveloped. Though it tries to hide it, Boston is a modern, dynamic city and it should, and will, continue to evolve. Preservation is still vital to such a city — as anyone who’s used the new Penn Station and is familiar with the old one can attest — but it takes more than simply blocking change. It also means ensuring that the changes which occur are consistent with the character or values that are most worth preserving. In general, I believe Boston has done both of these things remarkably well in the past. Whether it will continue to do so is impossible to predict, but when I look at a project like the new One P.O.S. and consider the future, I start to feel pretty blue.