Mayor aspires to a spire on the cutting edge
Mayor Thomas M. Menino wants to fill a hole in the Boston skyline with a modern skyscraper. Will the new building resemble a glass pickle, a desert flower, or Buddhist temple?
Those are the playful descriptions for some of the world's more recent tall buildings, 30 St. Mary Axe in London, the Burj Dubai proposed for the Persian Gulf city, and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lampur.
Whether some of those bold -- or outrageous -- designs would fit and be welcome in Boston is another matter. Despite some notable buildings such as the Hancock Tower and the Federal Reserve building, Boston's architecture has a conservative streak.
''The joke is that a lot of Boston office buildings look like the boxes the buildings would come in rather than the buildings themselves," said David Hacin, commissioner of urban design for the Boston Society of Architects.
But Menino's call for a 1,000-foot tower downtown in Winthrop Square, on the site of a city-owned parking structure, has Hacin and other architects and urban planners abuzz about the possibilities. Indeed, City Hall has loudly signaled to the development community it would like the new skyscraper -- Boston's tallest when completed -- to be cutting edge.
While a slim, almost needlelike profile is popular today, the Freedom Tower being built on the site of the World Trade Center buildings in Manhattan is a sturdy yet elegant spire-topped work that is supposed to echo other New York behemoths such as the Empire State and Chrysler buildings.
But at 1,776 feet, the Freedom Tower won't seem so statuesque compared with the giants growing out of the desert sands of Dubai. When the Al Burj, or Tower, is finished in 2010, it will give Dubai the two tallest buildings in the world. The buildings are intended to raise the city's profile -- literally -- as part of an ambitious economic campaign. The other is the Burj Dubai, a tapered, needlelike design that its architects, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, said is derived from a desert flower. It is under construction and scheduled to be finished in 2008. Both are projected to go up 2,300-2,400 feet.
Dubai won't happen here. ''Dubai's like the wild west," Hacin said. ''It's like Houston where anything goes and you get some really good stuff and some really bad stuff. Boston's not 'anything goes.' That's not our mantra here."
Meanwhile the Petronas Towers, the second-tallest buildings in the world, win praise from BSA president Jane Weinzapfel for their distinct Asian influences. She described the buildings' decoration and design as reflective of ''the Oriental temple form."
In London, 30 St. Mary Axe became both an instant classic and the butt of jokes as it grew on the London skyline. Now, the structure is known as ''The Gherkin." Weinzapfel describes it as ''a series of interlocking ovals that are of different dimensions and overlap each other. The building makes this shape that tapers toward the top like a pickle."
Designed by Sir Norman Foster, a skyscraper master, the Gherkin won a British architecture prize soon after it opened in 2004. But Hacin, for one, is not a fan. ''It's a green building and very innovative. But if you've ever seen it live, the building lands in a very uncomfortable position in the London historic fabric. It makes a statement in the skyline, but I'm not a fan of how it plays on the ground."
Many architects, however, said whatever is built in Boston must go beyond being tall and stylish and emulate the Gherkin's environmental attentiveness.
''To paraphrase Martin Luther King, we must judge a building by its character and not by the color of its skin," said Cambridge architect Hubert Murray. ''Architects are just waking up to environmental peril and any major building that goes up in Boston must address these issues."
Murray pointed to the Editt Tower, under construction in Singapore, as an example of a ''living" high-rise. It is designed by Malaysian architectural firm, T.R. Hamzah & Yeang, which describes itself as an ''ecologically responsive" company, and deploys what it calls ''vertical landscaping." Gardens and greenery burst from floor openings as the 26-story building, which is sheathed partly in glass, climbs to the sky.
