The 61-story hotel and condominium tower known as One Dalton is done. Rising 742 feet, it is the tallest residential building in Boston, just 48 feet shy of the city’s tallest structure, 200 Clarendon (originally known as the John Hancock Tower). Both were designed by the late Henry Cobb, of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, and, in a way, they bookend Cobb’s long career.
Built in 1976, the Hancock Tower provoked a fierce public backlash due to its height and proximity to Copley Square, where it looms over H.H. Richardson’s Trinity Church and McKim, Mead & White’s Boston Public Library. “The building’s restraint to the point of muteness, its refusal to reveal anything other than its obsession with its urban context, is surely its greatest strength but also its ultimate limitation as a work of architecture,” Cobb wrote in his memoir, Words & Works, 1948–2018: Scenes From a Life in Architecture. “Despite the forcefulness of its gesture, the tower remains virtually speechless, and this resolute self-denial is, in the end, both its triumph and its tragedy.”
You have 0 complimentary articles remaining.
Unlimited access + premium benefits for as low as $1.99/month.