The 60 State Street Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and built between 1975 and 1977 in Boston, MA.
60 State Street Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as The Bay Tower.
Its precise street address is 60 State Street, Boston, MA. You can also find it on the map here.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.
Commonly known as SOM, the firm was founded in Chicago in 1936 and has grown to be one of the largest architecture firms in the world.
Even long after its founders passed away, SOM has remained at the top of worldwide architectural excellence by attracting visionary architects. Amongst their most notorious partners we find names such as Gordon Bunshaft, Bruce Graham, Walter Netsch, Adrian Smith, Myron Goldsmith or David Childs.
SOM has also managed to grow and evolve to tackle the architectural challenges of each time, whatever those might be, and today is committed to aspects as important as efficiency and sustainability, as core values of their designs.
With a legacy spanning decades, SOM continues to shape the skylines of cities around the world, and is a usual contestant in any competition or selection process to design large-scale or iconic buildings and structures.
That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Cabot, Cabot & Forbes as the Main Developer.
The 60 State Street Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.
Postmodernism in architecture emerged in the United States during the late 1960s as a reaction against the starkness of the International Style, which part of the new generation of architects argued was too impersonal, sterile, and disconnected from historical and cultural contexts.
Postmodernism challenged the International Style's austerity by reintroducing historical elements and ornamentation, although this time not as literally as in the Neo-Classic buildings. Instead, they reinterpreted them within the context of modern materials and construction techniques.
Postmodern buildings often feature bold, contrasting colors, unconventional forms, and a playful blend of various architectural elements from different eras and cultures.
In the United States, Postmodernism was not just an aesthetic choice but also a philosophical stance. It represented a democratization of design, where architects sought to create buildings that were accessible and meaningful to a broader range of people, not just designers and intellectuals.
The 60 State Street Building was completed in 1977. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The 60 State Street Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.
The 60 State Street Building reaches an architectural height of 509ft (155m). It has a total of 41 floors, 38 above ground and 3 basements.
In regards to parking space, the building has a total of 240 spots available, which roughly equals 6 spots per floor (above ground).
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1977, the 60 State Street Building has mainly been used as Commercial space.
The 60 State Street Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete and steel slabs.
A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.
The facade of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.
From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features pink granite covering the triangular perimeter pillars that rise from the base and organize the facade. Between pillars a curtain wall system. Each module form the curtain wall is divided into a pink granite spandrel and a single glass plane above it.
