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:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces—in the beginning, there was spice.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)