CultureNOW - Prudential Tower: Charles Luckman Associates and Peter Vanderwarker

Prudential Tower

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Two pictures depict Boston as it morphed from a tired city with a failing economy to the boomtown of today.

We're looking at the Prudential Tower in the Back Bay. In the older view, it stands alone, under construction, surrounded by a sea of dereliction. In the current view, it looks more like a tall grandfather in a happy family portrait, surrounded by its architectural progeny.

Before the arrival of the Pru, the site was used only for the train yards of the Boston & Albany railroad. "These yards," wrote Walter Muir Whitehill in his snobbish but informative Boston: A Topographical History, "had for decades protected the Back Bay from the grubby infringements of Huntington Avenue and the even less desirable influence of the South End."

The Prudential Insurance Co. acquired the railroad land but then refused to build, claiming the real estate tax was too high. The state broke the deadlock by passing the legendary Chapter 121A, a law that provided the Pru (and many later developments) with a tax break.

The original Pru complex included, besides the office tower, a shopping mall, apartment houses, hotels, a parking garage, and a convention center. It as an island, though, painfully isolated from the rest of the city. Most of it was erected on a platform 18 feet above street level, high enough to clear the headroom of the Mass. Pike and railway tunnels that pierce the site. Also not helpful were the numerous windy and vacant plazas.

In recent years, the Pru's owners -- at first the insurance company, more recently Boston Properties -- have filled those dead plazas with a lively network of indoor shopping arcades. The Pru feels more like part of the city now, but nobody has ever called it beautiful. The tower's aluminum-curtain wall, although it's been modified, still looks like mesh you'd pull down over the front of your pawnshop to defy burglars. The architect was Charles Luckman, once the CEO of Lever Brothers, who turned to architecture in midlife.

The new photo shows the Pru tower in the background. In the foreground is new development that the Pru helped spawn. It's a vital scene, but a dismal one. A glass gerbil tube, which allows shoppers to glide through the city without actually touching it, spans a never-ending river of traffic exiting the turnpike. The tube connects the Copley Place shopping center, at left, with the Westin hotel. Both buildings look inward to their atriums and lobbies rather than outward to their neighbors. This is a world for cars, consumers, and conventioneers, not yet a place anyone can take pleasure in.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Self-Centered", Boston Globe, 13 March 2005

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Location

800 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02199
United States

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