One Boston Place Building

The One Boston Place Building is an International Style skyscraper designed by Pietro Belluschi, in association with Emery Roth & Sons, and built between 1967 and 1970 in Boston, MA.

One Boston Place Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The One Boston Place Building is also known, or has been known as, Boston Company Building, or Mellon Bank Building.

Its precise street address is 201 Washington Street, Boston, MA. You can also find it on the map here.

The One Boston Place Building has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 1970. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• TOBY Award in 2017
• BOMA Boston in 2022

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 2020 and 2005.

Pietro Belluschi was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Emery Roth & Sons.

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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the One Boston Place Building a reality:

• James Ruderman in charge of Structural Engineering
• Aberthaw Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• Cabot, Cabot & Forbes as the Main Developer

The One Boston Place Building can be categorized as an International Style building.

The One Boston Place Building uses a trussed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and reinforced concrete slabs.

A trussed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade of the building is load bearing. This is a direct consequence of the integration of the exterior "tube" into the facade, something which most trussed tube-in-tube buildings do in order to liberate the interior space from structural elements and achieve a more flexible interior.

So the facade of the builing is techinically load-bearing, yes, however, in between the load-bearing colums we find a curtain-wall type of facade, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a curtain wall made of dark glass and similarly dark metal frames, with a very characteristic diagonal pattern that is the trussed structure.

The entrance to the building is marked by a large two-level glass facade, with two revolving glass doors with steel frames .