an attempt to uncover the truth about September 11th 2001

M.I.T., Rotch Visual Collections

2. PARTICIPANTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

The writing, transmission, evaluation, and filing of documents is central to the evolution of a modern office tower. Each of the actors was involved in some part of the paper-shuffling process. Before a building is steel, granite and glass, it is paper, pencil and ink. Sixty State Street is defined through a series of these documents: drawings, specifications, detailed shop drawings, building permits, a land disposition agreement, letters of approval, memos, budgets, contracts, mortgages and loan agreements. This chapter discusses the major participants responsible for preparing that series of documents, outlining for each their objectives, organization, and working process.

The material for this chapter was drawn from two other reports in the Sixty State Street Design Case Study series. Sixty State Street: Organization for Design [503] by James Paulsen, undertakes an in-depth examination of each of the major actors in the design team: CCF, Aberthaw, SOM, IAN+A and Haley and Aldrich. Sixty State Street: A Case Study in Building Regulation [51] by Robert Shults and Mitchell Lewis Green, reviews the growth of building regulation in Boston, assesses the topology of the current situation, and contains a detailed study of the development process as affected by building regulation.

Development is a process, of which the actual construction of a building is but one act. How efficiently managed that process is will have profound impact on the profitability of the project. Figure 2.1 presents an overview of the development process. The figure includes only the members of the final design team. Figure 2.1a shows the actors influential in the conception of Sixty State Street. Figure 2.lb adds those actors brought in either as consultants to the design team or government agencies important to the approvals process. Figure 2.lc includes all subsidiary agencies and adds the many subcontractors necessary to construct and occupy the tower.

The development team is discussed first. Cabot, Cabot and Forbes is both developer and "client." Aberthaw Construction Company is the General Contractor. Hale and Dorr performs legal services. The design consultants include Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill as architects and structural engineers, I.A. Naman and Associates as mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineers, and Haley and Aldrich as geotechnical consultants.

Each of these has particular tasks to perform on their own and, in addition, must spend varying amounts of time coordinating their efforts with other design team members. By example, the decision on placement of the foundation wall affected Haley and Aldrich's decision for a retention system, SOM's architectural decision on the shape of the building.and Hale and Dorr's position as CCF's agent for negotiation of land sale agreements with the City. Figure 2.2 charts the effort, in person hours, spent on Sixty State Street by SOM, IAN+A, H&A and Hale and Dorr.

The graphs share a common scale; however, the numerical value of the magnitudes has been omitted. The figure covers time spent by team members between the beginning of 1972 and the end of 1975. The previous effort of two members, H&A and Hale and Dorr, who had been retained on the Sixty State Street project by CCF since the latter 1960's, is represented by an average work level over a three-month period. The record of effort by S0M between July 1972 and September 1974 was available only as an aggregation of the architectural and structural group's time. But from September 1974 onward, the time data were available separately for architectural and structural studio members, and so separate graphs were prepared. The graphs were offset to approximate the relative effort expended by each group.

Along the lower axis of the graph are placed a number of important events in the development process. Vertical lines projected upward from these dates provide an opportunity to relate the effort expended to Sixty State Street's more recent history. The relevance of some dates is apparent. Consider the pair of lines which correspond to: l) revision to development guidelines, December 20, 1973, and 2) Mayor White's encouragement of development to Gerald Blakeley, February 5, 1974. Note that the first event seems to have had little effect on the effort of SOM, while the second "produced" a flurry of activity. Another event of significance to the entire team was the publication of the Environmental Impact Statement after a series of successful hearings in the spring of 1974. Note that time spent by SOM, IAN+A and H&A increased dramatically a short time after this event. The authors are careful, however, to note that the correspondence of events to fluctuations in the time data do not necessarily prove a causal relationship.

The efforts of the development team are matched by the involvement of many elements of the public sector. Figure 2.1 has grouped the many agencies which impacted the design of Sixty State Street under either the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) or the Office of the Mayor of the City of Boston (Mayor). The public sector regulated the development process through a series of permits, codes, zoning ordinances, tax agreements, historical and environmental reviews. This chapter will examine three government units which heavily impacted Sixty State Street's development: the Office of the Mayor, the Boston Building Department, and the BRA.

Home Page