Material
The structural design is made up of composite beams and girders supporting steel deck and concrete topping slab on a steel frame. The 25-story superstructure is founded on 6-foot (1.8 m) thick foundation mat bearing on clay. The 6-story low-rise is founded on spread footings, hold down piles (tension piles) and 24-inch (610 mm) pressure slab designed to resist a hydrostatic head of approximately 25 feet (7.6 m). The parking garage is made up of slurry wall construction.
The building's distinctive design includes carved rose granite cladding with two-story windows, a vaulted copper roof line, and strong exterior column detailing. The design, by John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson as Design Consultant, also includes a main building entrance through a courtyard, framed on each side by two symmetrical wings, each faced with soaring columns.
Read more about this topic: 500 Boylston Street
Famous quotes containing the word material:
“We must accept or refuse one another as we are. I could tame a hyena more easily than my Friend. He is a material which no tool of mine will work.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“‘Tis too plain that with the material power the moral progress has not kept pace. It appears that we have not made a judicious investment. Works and days were offered us, and we took works.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)