The John F. Kennedy Federal Building is a United States governmental office building in the Government Center area of Boston, Massachusetts. Named for former US president John F. Kennedy, the building was completed in 1966 and designed by Walter Gropius and The Architects Collaborative with Samuel Glaser. It consists of a pair of 26-story, towers to the west, and a four-story low-rise wing with an interior courtyard to the east, connected by a glass corridor. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.
The building occupies about half of a site oriented southwest–northeast. The rest of the parcel contains landscaping, along with plazas adjoining the nearby Boston City Hall Plaza. The grounds have two sculptures honoring Kennedy: Dimitri Hadzi's Thermopylae and Herbert Ferber's Full Circle: Profile in Courage. The facade is made of polished granite cladding on the lower stories and reinforced concrete on the upper stories, with glass windows and curved corners. The building spans with concrete slabs in the low-rise wing and a steel superstructure elsewhere. The two basement levels have ancillary areas, such as storage, while the first floor has two lobbies, a clinic, offices, and a laboratory. Above the first floor, the low-rise wing has spaces such as offices, a cafeteria, conference spaces, and light industrial space, while the tower is mainly devoted to offices.
The building was developed as part of the Government Center megaproject, first proposed in the late 1950s. Site selection was delayed due to disagreements between the General Services Administration (GSA) and the city, but the site and architects were eventually selected in 1961. A groundbreaking ceremony for the site took place on July 8, 1963, and the site was dedicated by Kennedy's brother Robert F. Kennedy on September 9, 1966. During the late 20th century, the building underwent several fire-safety upgrades and a renovation, and a plan to demolish the low-rise wing was unsuccessful. In the 21st century, it has continued to host federal agencies. Over the years, the JFK Federal Building received mixed commentary.
Site The JFK Federal Building is located at 15 New Sudbury Street in the Government Center section of Downtown Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The building occupies a site measuring roughly across. The site is oriented northeast–southwest, on axis with the intercardinal directions, and is bounded by Congress Street to the northeast, New Sudbury Street to the northwest, and Cambridge Street to the southwest. The building abuts Boston City Hall Plaza to the southeast. Originally, the section of City Hall Plaza near the JFK Building included a fountain and a promenade of trees. The building's form, or general shape and configuration, consists of twin towers beside a low-rise wing.
Landscape and hardscape features The building occupies about 45% of the parcel, the rest of which is occupied by extensive landscaping, along with hardscape features such as plazas and driveways. A plaza wraps around the building's southwest and southeast elevations. Gray-granite parapets, with aluminum railings and inset light fixtures, wrap around the site's northeast and southwest corners. The plaza is divided into two levels. The two levels impeded pedestrian circulation somewhat, since pedestrians in City Hall Plaza had to ascend to reach the JFK Building plaza's upper section.
The upper portion of the plaza, near the high-rise towers to the west, is paved in dark granite. The upper plaza has two conical air-circulation vents measuring in diameter and tall, with granite benches, along with a smaller conical exhaust vent for the emergency generators. The upper plaza also has concrete tables surrounded by benches of the same material, along with standalone metal-and-concrete benches. The retaining wall surrounding the upper plaza is made of polished granite. Abutting the south side of the low-rise wing, situated to the east, is a lower plaza. The lower plaza is made of red brick, the same material as the neighboring City Hall Plaza. As built, the two plazas are level with each other. Concrete traffic bollards, installed after the September 11 attacks, separate the lower plaza from City Hall Plaza.
The northeast and northwest elevations (facing Congress and New Sudbury streets respectively) have sidewalks, entrances, and driveways. On both elevations, there are shrubs, a grassy strip, and a pipe railing separating the building from the sidewalk. On the Congress Street elevation is a driveway to the low-rise wing's ground-story basement (below the first floor), with a security screening booth. At the northern corner is a playground, with a concrete wall separating it from the intersection of Congress and New Sudbury streets. On New Sudbury Street, there is a driveway and security booth, which restrict access to a ground-level parking area just outside a loading dock. Just to the west (abutting the tower section) is a curved drop-off loop leading to one of the low-rise wing's entrances. The landscape design also originally included a variety of tree species. Some of the original oak and linden trees remain extant near the low-rise wing, and there are also periwinkle and winter creeper in the low-rise wing's internal courtyard.
Outdoor artwork
The building has two outdoor sculptures. Dimitri Hadzi's abstract bronze sculpture Thermopylae, in front of one tower, was created in 1966. Thermopylae measures tall and weighs , being made of twenty pieces. It was named for the Battle of Thermopylae, which took place in 480 BCE, and inspired by President John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage and his war record. In 1966, Herbert Ferber designed an abstract sculpture of welded copper and stainless steel, Full Circle: Profile in Courage, which was installed in 1968. Installed within the interior light court, Full Circle measures across and consists of several curved design details penetrating a circle.
Architecture The building was designed by The Architects Collaborative (TAC), along with Samuel Glaser Associates. The architects most involved with the design were TAC partners in charge Walter Gropius and Norman C. Fletcher, TAC senior associate Roland Kluve, and Glaser Associates architects Samuel Glaser and Clifford H. Towne. Towne also coordinated communications between the architects and the building's client, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). LeMessurier Consultants was the structural engineer. In designing the building, Gropius said he wanted to eliminate all preconceptions of the building so it could "function both practically and psychologically". Gropius said the federal building's design complemented that of the new City Hall, and, in response to implications that the design lacked originality, said that "we cannot make a new architecture every month".
Form The towers rise 26 stories, and the low-rise wing is four stories high. The building, with its towers, is cited as measuring tall. Each tower has a rectangular, floor plan. The conjoined towers are oriented with their longer axes northwest–southeast and are offset from each other; the western tower extends farther south, while the eastern tower extends farther north.
The low-rise wing is about tall and has a rectangular, floor plan. Its longer axis is oriented northeast–southwest, extending perpendicularly off the towers. The low-rise wing's second story protrudes from the facade's southern elevation. There is an interior courtyard of about at the low-rise wing's center. This courtyard has a Japanese maple and a floor surface composed of red squares and octagons, accented with gray.
The combination of tall and short massings is a common Modern form that is used extensively throughout the United States and abroad, including in other GSA buildings such as Denver's Byron G. Rogers Federal Building and Los Angeles's Wilshire Federal Building. The GSA also wanted to physically separate regional and nationwide offices. The double towers were a compromise between GSA requirements and the Government Center development's design principles. The GSA had mandated that high-rise tower floors be at least , which typically would have created a thicker tower, but the building was supposed to have only on average. The decision to create conjoined towers was inspired by a contemporaneous building in Düsseldorf, Germany, which consisted of three conjoined rectangular masses. To avoid drawing attention from Boston City Hall as the focal point of City Hall Plaza, the towers are placed at the western end of the site, away from the plaza. The double towers increased the number of offices lit by natural light, and they allowed the building to meet the GSA's minimum floor area requirements. In addition, with the office space split into conjoined towers, it was less visually domineering than monolithic high-rise buildings, such as Prudential Tower.
Facade
In general, the facade lacks ornamentation and uses the same concrete-and-glass wall design. The exterior aluminum work is medium-gray with a dark anodized finish. The lower stories have polished granite cladding, while the upper stories are covered in precast panels made of reinforced concrete. Similarly to Gropius's earlier Pan Am Building, the panels were made using the Mo-Sai method, with quartz aggregate embedded into white concrete. The panels measure tall and divide the building vertically into bays measuring wide. Each bay has a single panel per story, with a thicker spandrel at its bottom and a thinner, recessed lintel or sub-spandrel at its top. The bays are vertically separated by protruding, precast concrete fins, which are interrupted by the lintels. The corners have rounded edges, which conceal columns at the corners of the steel frame. The rounded corners may allude to the curved streets that formerly occupied Scollay Square, or the curved facade of Sears' Crescent and Sears' Block, a pair of buildings across City Hall Plaza.
The concrete panels' windows are arranged in bands extending horizontally across the facade. Some parts of the facade use glass walls, which, along with the low-rise wing's courtyard and the exterior hardscaping, were intended to visually link the outdoor and indoor spaces. The towers and low-rise wing are connected at their first and third stories. The connector's first story has a double-height glass curtain wall. The third story, has a similar concrete facade to the rest of the building, is supported on a pair of girders spanning the two buildings, giving the impression that it floats above the ground-story facade.
Low-rise wing The low-rise wing's ground level is clad in granite and has a more irregular window arrangement than the first story and above. At the first story, the southeast elevation has an entrance pavilion leading to one of its lobbies. The entrance is positioned off-center, with a cantilevered portico, and is flanked by a pair of precast-concrete piers. Between the piers, a set of granite stairs leads to a deeply recessed set of plate-glass doors. Above the first-story portico, the entrance pavilion has deeply recessed tempered-glass windows. The northwest elevation on New Sudbury Street has a similar entrance pavilion, which faces the drop-off loop. New Sudbury Street has additional, smaller entrances: three for vehicles and one for pedestrians. The northeast elevation on Congress Street has a garage door.
The low-rise courtyard is surrounded by another facade. On the first story and part of the second story, the courtyard facade is primarily composed of glass panels separated by concrete fins. The rest of the courtyard's second story, along with its entire third story, has a similar concrete facade to the rest of the building.
Towers