Pier 4

This privately-developed public park and plaza sets a new standard for Boston's Seaport — more intimately connected to the water, more evocative of the working piers of the past, and more welcoming to a diverse community of users. Rough, robustly built, and in touch with its coastal condition, the park responds to both the desires of today's urban residents for informality and authenticity and to the unpredictability of a changing climate.

A former parking lot and site of one of Boston's busiest restaurants, Pier 4 required significant infrastructural upgrades. The reconstruction became an opportunity for us to express the distinct conditions of the urban pier — filled land retained by seawalls and pile-supported boardwalks overhanging the changing harbor. Where seawalls needed reconstruction, we also took the opportunity to mitigate wave action and reinforce the pier to withstand future storms.

  We honored the site’s history as a working harbor through the use of granite seawalls, stone revetments, wood pilings, and wood decks. Knowing that the Seaport has been built at an elevation bound to be inundated, we intentionally broke down the seawalls, creating space for water to move in and out of the site with reduced force. We created opportunities for infiltration and treatment of water to protect the harbor during heavy rainfall, chose plants that thrive in these conditions, and built soils and irrigation systems to shed salts quickly after the storms we know will come.

   This tectonic vocabulary of these sloped, suspended, and carved surfaces also invites visitors and residents to experience the dynamic waterfront in ways found nowhere else along the urbanized harbor edge. From most of Boston’s Harborwalk, the primary experience of the water is as something to be viewed from above. In contrast, at the end of a dramatic approach from the city, people step down a series of Tidal Terraces that dissolve into the water at high tide. People float out over the Harbor. They climb up to a panoramic promontory, and they gather in a public plaza and play on a sunny lawn that tilts up towards East Boston on the horizon. Dialogue between feeling enclosed and protected and feeling exposed and panoramic emerges from this collection of moments. Pier 4 structures a new dialogue between city and sea.

Reconnecting the Harbor and the City Harbor

Situated at a unique juncture along Boston’s 43-mile public Harborwalk, this project mends a missing link in the experience of the water’s edge, reconnecting historic downtown Boston with South Boston and the emerging mixed-use neighborhood along the industrial edge of the harbor. We leveraged the Harborwalk as a vital tool to invite the public to enter the site and to encourage gathering along and interacting with the water. Weaving the Harborwalk into the grid of the city and hybridizing the materials of the public sidewalk with those native to the pier, we sought to break down as many perceived boundaries as possible. These moves transform a privately developed landscape into a publicly-accessible and welcoming plaza and park, while still providing for the needs of those who live and work in the adjacent buildings.