One Dalton: Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences | Boston, Massachusetts | 2020

Architects:Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects LLP. with CambridgeSeven
Client: Carpenter & Company, Inc.
General Contractor: Tishman Construction Corporation
Photographers: Taehyung Park and Sami Matar

One Dalton: Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences contains a 215-room hotel on its lower twenty floors and 174 residential condominiums on the forty floors above. 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. 

While the shape of the site for the tower clearly invited a triangular floor plan, the vertical extension of an unmodified equilateral triangle would have produced a built form with broad surfaces and sharp corners, making it an overbearing and ungracious neighbor to the adjoining townhouses. The architects, therefore, shaped the tower into a soft triangle with gently curved sides and rounded corners—a form well suited to both the hotel in its lower floors and the residential occupancy above. The latter is distinguished by vertical incisions that enliven the tower’s all-glass surface while creating corner windows with operable sashes in the perimeter rooms of every apartment. By thus explicitly acknowledging the tower’s residential component, this articulation of the exterior wall celebrates the aggregation of multiple occupancies within the singularity of One Dalton while also clearly distinguishing it from neighboring office towers.

Because the site is immediately adjacent to Prudential Center yet integral to Christian Science Plaza, its redevelopment presented a fascinating design challenge: 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.