One Dalton: Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences
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
Hotel entrance
Residential entrance
Glass-screened incisions in the tower’s surface animate the building volume while accommodating operable windows on the condominium floors.
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: Pei Cobb Freed & Partners