Two International Place Building

The Two International Place Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Johnson/Burgee Architects, and built between 1987 and 1992 in Boston, MA.

Its precise street address is 2 International Place, Boston, MA. You can also find it on the map here.

The building is comprised of a 35-story tower and a 13-story annex. It is one of the towers in a five-structures complex. The Two International Place is linked to One Internacional Place by a fountain court and winter garden.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2023.

Johnson/Burgee Architects was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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 Two International Place Building a reality:

• McNamara/Salvia, Inc. in charge of Structural Engineering
• Turner Construction as the Main Contractor
• Fujitec America as the company in charge of the elevators system
• The Chiofaro Company as the Main Developer

The Two International Place Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Two International Place Building was completed in 1992. By 1992 the Postmodernism movement was experiencing a transition. Critics argued that Postmodernism, initially a rebellious and innovative style, had become formulaic and commercialized, and so the trend started moving away from blending historical styles, irony, and playful ornamentation, and begun to give way to emerging architectural trends concerned with more present matters such as technology, ecology or sustainability.

The Two International Place Building uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and reinforced concrete slabs.

A framed 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 framed 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 modular type of facade, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features unpolished pink marble panels with fixed windows and aluminum frames. In one section of the facade, the windows resemble tripartite windows, but in this case, the upper lunette is false. In another area, the facade is composed of a curtain wall with reflective glass, aluminum frames, and glass spandrels.

The footprint of the building is circular, and it's crowned by an octagonal-based pyramid.