Design Review: Boston's Posh New High Rise

Robert Campbell, architecture critic for the Boston Globe, writes a column describing Boston's newest skyscraper as a design success.

The building, One Dalton Street, achieves this success despite having "no particular reason to exist," writes Campbell. "With a posh Four Seasons hotel occupying its lower floors and luxury condos in its upper levels — one penthouse has reportedly been sold for $40 million — it’s a place for people who choose to experience the life of a busy urban world while living far above it."

Still, the building is in full command of its details, according to Campbell, to the point of a military comparison. The real magic of the building, according to Campbell, is the building's "powerful sculptural form in play with its surroundings."

The senior architect on the project, Henry Cobb, "studied historic railway lines and street maps of this part of Boston" before realizing that "the land had always been organized as a loose arrangement of triangles." Those triangles are manifested in the floor plans of every level in the building above the fifth.