Seaport Square Block L4
Update
05/23/19
WS Development & Amazon to Break Ground on Tuesday in the Seaport
Seaport will usher in its next exciting wave of development with the groundbreaking of 111 Harbor Way (Block L4 of the Boston Seaport project), home to Amazon’s new office in the heart of the Seaport neighborhood. Attendees will include Governor Baker, Mayor Walsh, the WS Development team and representatives from Amazon.
Slated for completion in 2021, the building is a central component of WS Development’s Boston Seaport project, the largest single real estate endeavor in city history, spanning 23 acres across 20 city blocks.
111 Harbor Way is a 525,000 square foot, 17-story building with two stories devoted to retail and restaurant uses. Last year, Amazon announced it would expand its Boston Tech Hub and create an additional 2,000 high-tech jobs, in fields including machine learning, speech science, cloud computing, and robotics engineering. To accommodate the new job creation, Amazon will be expanding into 430,000 square feet of new office space at 111 Harbor Way.
WS Development chose esteemed 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 Harbor Square Park, a 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 for the Seaport.
Harbor Square Park is a focal point of the future Harbor Way, a 1/3-mile public promenade that will connect Summer Street to the water’s edge – a plan conceived of by the world-renowned landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations, possibly best 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 and music performances, markets, and a public winter skating rink.
