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Hancock Place, designed by I. M. Pei, is the tallest building in Boston. It is 790 feet (241 meters) in height and has 60 floors. It was completed in 1976 and is arguably the most prestigious address in Boston. I used to live there and can vouch for this personally. Hancock Place is not located in the city's Financial District and as such it has wonderful unobstructed views of the downtown area as well as across the Charles River into Cambridge. It is located in the city's Back Bay neighborhood, home to the previous record holder, the Prudential Tower which is 749 feet (228 meters) in height and was completed in 1964. The most recent tall building constructed in Boston is known as 111 Huntington Avenue. 111 Huntington is 554 feet (169 meters ) in height, was completed in 2002 and is only the eighth tallest building in Boston. It is located immediate adjacent to the Prudential Tower and is part of the same complex. The Hancock and Prudential are often used as establishing shots in movies, television shows (Cheers) and during sporting events and can be considered iconic.
There are several new tall buildings that have been proposed for Boston and a few have been approved but it remains to be seen if they will be built as planned due to the current economic crisis. Financing might be impossible to secure and the demand for space might not materialize.
Trans National Place, also known as 115 Winthrop Square, is one tall building proposed for construction in Boston, Massachusetts. It was supposed to be designed by famed architect Renzo Piano but he has since left the project. The current plan is for a building in the Financial District of 1000 feet in height that would be the city's tallest. However, on May 15, 2008, the Federal Aviation Administration objected to the the building's proposed height, deeming the structure a possible flight obstruction to the air traffic of nearby Logan International Airport.
An 800 foot tower called South Bay Tower was proposed for the area near the city's Chinatown but this project is deemed to be all but dead.
South Station Tower is a skyscraper approved for construction. The tower is planned to rise 621 feet (189 m), with 41 floors, and will consist of a hotel, condominium units, office space, and a parking structure. It would be the third tallest building in the city. It is planned to be built atop Boston's historic South Station complex. It was originally designed with a height of 759 feet (231 m), which included a decorative spire. However, the project was downscaled in 2006.
One of the reasons Boston does not have buildings on the scale of New York or Chicago is that the geology of the city makes it unsuitable, at least historically. New technologies might make it more economically feasible now but in the United States the shift has been away from megabuildings almost from the day the World Trade Center and Sears Tower were completed. These types of buildings are economically poor when it comes to operating budgets due to the floor space lost from all of the elevator banks just to name one. Tall buildings tend to be vanity projects for bragging rights so it should come as no surprise that the newest record holders are in up and coming parts of the world, particularly China, Taiwan, and the Persian Gulf. There is a large tower being constructed in Chicago for residential use but the elevator demands in a residential tower are much lower as are the needs for things like bathrooms.
Back to geology, Boston is at sea level and the soil tends to have a high water content, high variability in density, and a rather deep distance to reach bedrock. Manhattan on the other hand has bedrock relatively close to the surface, especially in Midtown and Lower Manhattan (notice how the skyline drops noticeably in the Chelsea, Greenwich Village and Soho neighborhoods. The bedrock is much deeper there.
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