Rising out of the Bullfinch Crossing section of downtown Boston, One Congress is a one-million-square-foot, trophy office tower, and is part of the Carr Properties family. Offering extensive retail, vibrant net-zero pedestrian spaces, and towering 600 feet, this iconic building reconnects downtown Boston neighborhoods and propels a heavily transit-served site into a 21st-century global center.

Like other Carr owned and managed properties, wellness, sustainability, and luxury are the core tenets upheld throughout the commercial spaces. Among these environments are a myriad of amenities combining the best of resimercial integrations.

Given the scale and diversity of the building systems needed at One Congress, Carr contracted with long-time CI expert, John Carroll, Chief Technology Officer at Nard’s Entertainment.

Carroll, himself an industry veteran, also happened to be a Carr vendor partner and already had plenty of experience designing unique, highly “repeatable” control and automation systems for Carr properties. For this project, Carroll was joined by Carr Chief Technology Officer, Ilan Zachar as well.

Carroll Discusses “Working Backwards” When Designing for Complex Systems

In planning for all the numerous subsystems within the building, Carroll opted for URC’s Total Control as the main driver for control and automation throughout One Congress. When designing for a such a structure, Carroll stated, he finds it easiest to start simple, and then work backwards, building the simplest interface he can first before building out anything else.

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“We start at the URC keypad and design the interface with the fewest buttons, touches or voice commands, for this system to work.” Then, working backward, Carroll and his team from Nard’s craft the system with audio equipment, then video equipment.

This system also featured a variety of system controllers such as the MRX-30 from URC’s broader portfolio. Additionally, nearly 20 URC touch screens and handheld remotes including the TDC-9100 and the TDC-8600 were used throughout the building as interfaces for staff and occupants.

On the audio side, Carroll used URC’s HDA (high-definition audio), as it provided easy integration within the existing URC system as well as built-in DSP.

The sheer size of this project ended up calling for a massive system that included ten (10) HDA-1600 amps at 600 Watts per channel @ 8Ω; 1200 Watts / channel @ 4Ω / 2 x 600 Watts @ 70-Volt. Carr also wanted 96 kHz / 24-bit streaming high-definition audio quality.

Each zone supports a full 5-band parametric EQ, full ducking and paging event support, and storage of up to 10 .WAV Files in each chassis.

Products from Bose, Draper, Just Add Power, Legrand, Luxul, NEC, Panasonic, Sony, Vaddio, Danco, Vanguard, and Zeevee were used as well to help round out the experience.

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