Boston, MA WS Development and Turner Construction celebrated the ceremonial topping off of 111 Harbor Way (Block L4 of the Boston Seaport project), which will soon become home to Amazon’s new office in the Seaport neighborhood.
Slated for completion in 2021, 111 Harbor Way is a central component of WS Development’s Boston Seaport project, spanning 33 acres across 20 city blocks.
111 Harbor Way is a 525,000 s/f, 17-story building with two stories devoted to retail and restaurant uses. Amazon will use 430,000 s/f of 111 Harbor Way for valuable office space and job creation as it expands its Boston Tech Hub and creates an additional 2,000 jobs, which were announced in 2018 in fields including machine learning, speech science, cloud computing, and robotics engineering.
“Today marks an important milestone for a development project that delivers economic opportunities for many residents of Boston and generates investments in affordable housing and workforce training programs. I want to congratulate WS Development and the project team on achieving this milestone and look forward to welcoming over 2,000 new jobs to Boston when the building is completed,” said mayor Martin Walsh.
“In these uncertain times, it is ever more important to set our sights on Boston’s bright future. This morning, we celebrate all that this building signifies for Seaport and for Boston – job creation, economic empowerment, innovation, and the expansion of the public realm in our community. We are incredibly grateful to Amazon for their belief in Seaport, to Mayor Walsh and our partners in government for supporting our vision, and to our partners at Turner Construction and the skilled men and women of the building trades in Boston for their commitment to excellence and safety,” said Yanni Tsipis, senior vice president, Seaport, WS Development
WS Development chose architectural firm Gensler to envision and design the tower.
In a collaboration between its Boston and San Francisco offices, Gensler respected the authentic industrial context of the Seaport, creating a building that has a timeless aesthetic and a highly articulated expression. The building’s design emphasizes human-focused elements, including outdoor terraces on alternating floors and the Paseo, a street-level interior public promenade lined with shops, cafes, and a welcoming central amphitheater. The Paseo will lead pedestrians to a new one-acre public space being constructed concurrently with the building, which will expand the public realm in the Seaport and create a vibrant new open space hub. This new park is a focal point of the future Harbor Way, a 1/3-mile public promenade that will connect Summer St. to the water’s edge – a plan conceived of by landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations, well known for their work on Manhattan’s High Line. The park will create a hub of community activity across all seasons, hosting hundreds of public events annually including art, music performances and markets