Summary

9 - 1 1 R e s e a r c h

an attempt to uncover the truth about September 11th 2001

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M.I.T., Rotch Visual Collections

Visual Communications in Building Technology Project

1.10 SUMMARY

The evolution of Sixty State Street has been lengthy and difficult. The office tower encountered several major regulatory conflicts and has withstood a fundamental change in what planners believe the City of Boston ought to be like and what city government ought to encourage. The history of Sixty State is the steady dissolution of a developer's opportunity as a result of environmental, aesthetic, historical, political and economic struggles. At each stage, the office tower proposed was the artifact of that struggle. The principle artifacts are the six major design proposals (see figure 1.17). The realized artifact will contain about one-third the area of office space originally projected for the site in 1966.

Realization of Sixty State has been marked by irregularities in what is commonly thought to be the most repetitive of construction processes: the raising of a speculative office tower. Nonetheless, progress has been clearly visible. Figure 1.18 presents a series of photographs of Sixty State Street during the first two years of construction.

Completion of the present building process will not result in finished, habitable office space. A second phase of building will begin some time in 1977. A series of smaller projects to infill the enclosed structural shell, fitting out particular spaces to identified tenants' needs. These smaller projects will continue for some time and recur periodically as leases expire and tenants change, or as existing tenants determine changes needed in their environment.

Figure 1.19 presents a timeline history of the Sixty State Street project. The timeline begins in 1960 with the arrival of Edward Logue and continues to the present. Highlighted are the major design proposals, changes in actors, dates of approvals and milestones of the construction process. In fact, the three activities summarized above, design, construction and infill, are importantly related and exist within a much larger time framework. Figure 1.20 summarizes the history of the northeast corner of Congress and State, locating the present structure and projecting its lifespan. It is apparent that as time goes on, the design and building energy discussed in this report will be reduced in importance compared to the ongoing rhythm of small construction projects initiated by Sixty State's inhabitants. Without this initial design and building effort, however, the infill process would have no support. Chapter One has focused on the design/building process of the Sixty State Street framework. Chapter Two will now examine the major actors responsible for the evolution of the realized framework.

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