John F. Kennedy Federal Building

About

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, 387-foot (118 m) 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 4.5-acre (1.8 ha) 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 839,000 square feet (77,900 m2) 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.