Boston Skyline

The John Hancock Tower, finished in 1976, is a 790-foot mirrored glass rhomboid and the most elegant thing in the Boston skyline. It also spent years with plywood where its windows should have been. Hundreds of the 500-pound glass panes cracked and fell to the street below, and the building stood partly boarded while the cause was traced to the double-glazing bonding rather than the structure.

All 10,344 panes were eventually replaced. The result is a tower that reflects the sky so completely it can disappear in certain light, standing a few hundred feet from the Prudential Center, which is squat, concrete and from an entirely different design philosophy.

Boston stayed short for a long time, and deliberately. Height restrictions protected sightlines to the State House dome and kept shadows off Boston Common and the Public Garden — the shadow laws are still real constraints on what can be built and where.

Logan Airport sitting directly across the harbour adds a federal ceiling on top of the local one. The outcome is a skyline of a few isolated tall buildings over a broad low brick-and-granite mass, rather than a continuous wall, and a model that packs the towers together misrepresents the city completely.

Two towers carry the Back Bay. 200 Clarendon — the Hancock to everyone here — is the mirrored rhomboid, and the Prudential Center is the blunt concrete slab beside it. They are from different decades and different philosophies and they define the skyline between them.

One Dalton, finished in 2019, is the slim three-sided tower that finally joined them. Downtown and the Financial District sit lower and denser to the east, with the Custom House Tower's clock — a 1915 campanile set on a Greek Revival base — standing out because nothing around it looks remotely like it. The whole composition is deliberately low, which is what distinguishes Boston from any other city this size.