One Dalton: Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences
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Boston’s commanding new skyscraper conjures architectural magic
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Two towers and a small park comprise this high-density mixed-use development adjoining Prudential Center and Christian Science Plaza in the Back Bay, defining the western terminus of Boston’s High Spine.
The Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences—at sixty-one floors the taller of the towers—contains a 215-room hotel on its lower twenty floors and 174 residential condominiums on the forty floors above. Shaped as a soft triangle in plan and sheathed in low-reflectance high-performance insulating glass, the tower rises from a granite-and-glass podium containing the condominium lobby and the public rooms of the hotel.
Because the site is immediately adjacent to Prudential Center yet integral to Christian Science Plaza, its redevelopment presents a fascinating design challenge: namely, to consider how a tall building, together with the open spaces it frames, can respond creatively to the need for growth while showing appropriate respect for their historic urban setting in Boston’s Back Bay.
Show Facts
Site
Southeast corner of Belvidere and Dalton streets, at the edge of Christian Science Plaza in the Back Bay
Components
706,000 ft2 / 66,000 m2 gross area; luxury hotel with dedicated hotel lobby, retail, café, restaurant, ballrooms, meeting rooms, gym, and spa; residential condominiums with fireplaces, balconies on upper floors, private lobby with porte-cochère, commons room with accommodations for private dining, theater, kids' playroom, golf simulator, pet grooming
Client
Carpenter & Company, Inc.
PCF&P Services
Competition and concept design in collaboration with Cambridge Seven Associates, architecture; exterior envelope
Sustainability
Designed & registered for LEED Silver certification
Awards
American Architecture Award
Chicago Athenaeum, 2020
Design Award of Honor
Society of American Registered Architects, 2019
Architectural Design / Tall Buildings
Architecture MasterPrize, 2020
The Architecture Community: Global Design Award, Hospitality Projects
World Design Awards, 2020
Rethinking the Future Award: Large-scale residential
RTF Architecture Awards, 2020
Gold Key Awards: Best Guestroom Luxury
Boutique Design, 2020
One Dalton, with the 1970 administration building of the Christian Science Center, also by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners
Site plan, with 30 Dalton and the new park at left
View from St. Germain Street
Hotel entrance
Residential entrance
Residential entrance
Glass-screened incisions in the tower’s surface animate the building volume while accommodating operable windows on the condominium floors.
Typical floor plans: residences (top), hotel (bottom)
Terrace at duplex penthouse
Terrace at duplex penthouse
Project Credits
Collaborating Architect: Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc., Cambridge; Gary Johnson, Lead Designer; Structural: WSP USA, New York; Mechanical / Electrical / Plumbing: WSP USA, Boston and New York; Landscape: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc., New York and Cambridge; Images: Taehyung Park / Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Sami Matar