5 minute read
45 High Street, Reading Massachusetts
Jeffrey Olinger
the urban uncanny; all things are temporal
We celebrate moments in the urban fabric where quirky incongruencies form novel civic forms. Older, pre-modern cities are littered with such places, and are beloved for their humane scale and visual variety. As Jane Jacobs observed ‘Every cat needs its corner’.
Sometimes it is geometry that shapes such novel forms, a force that supersedes the regular order of the city, evoking an uncanny sensibility of the passage of time because each quirk reveals a places’ temporal layering. Triangular parcels are quirky urban misfits, left as open space for multiple reasons, but principally because the shape of the parcel resists the conventional overlay of an orthographic building structure.
Flatiron parcels are a kind of incidental urbanism and are formed as collateral parcels of land in a dynamic city. Daniel Burnham’s eponymous Flatiron Building in New York City is the product of conflict, where Broadway’s ancient route survives Manhattan’s gridiron, which at 5th Avenue creates the parcel’s unique 23° corner. One of our projects, Inman Crossing in Cambridge, MA, is the product of divergence, where the 36° flatiron parcel is formed from a fork in the road, with travellers to Medford turning west, and travellers to Charlestown going east. 45 High Street ’s 33° flatiron parcel in Reading, Massachusetts is a product of paths converging at the historic Reading-Maine Railroad Depot located at the apex of the project site.
When our firm began conceptualising the layout of 45 High Street, the dinner game Zeno’s Saganaki sprang to mind: a piece of fried saganaki cheese is divided by each diner until it can be subdivided no more, replicating in food form Zeno’s ancient ‘Dichotomy Paradox’. Similarly, 45 High Street ’s parcel can be studied as fractal pattern of diminishing nested rectangles. This study helped us to understand the serrated nature of the parcel’s edge.
We aslo, in general, attend to the rhythms of civic development, where architecture is a dynamic combination of space and culture over time. Designs reconcile themselves with the current tastes of the city expressed through the mundane language of zoning and civic regulation. Many of our projects begin with an underutilised property with the potential to achieve a more productive purpose, a purpose initially defined by our developer clients.
Duration and frequency are two ways of reading architecture’s accommodation of the spatial and cultural stresses that underly all projects. In 45 High Street we evaluated a myriad of time scales, breaking down the program into clearly articulated cycles of time. For example, the ground level retail is subject to short cycles of activities intrinsically linked to the schedule of the MBTA commuter rail train station across the street. The cadence of the train creates a regular ebb and flow of occupants and establishes the design of flexible transient spaces.
If we scale up our time considerations we find that the daily cycles of spatial uses, such as parking garage activity and residential occupancy patterns, shift the focus from the scale of the individual to the scale of the unit, whether that be an apartment, retail storefront, or parking space. Weekly time cycles begin to address community concerns over waste management and the scheduling of shared building amenities, that impact the city at the scale of the building. Monthly cycles address issues of tenancy and impact the city at a neighbourhood scale. Seasonal cycles allow for the broad strokes of a building’s yearly activity which speak to events that impact the city at a civic scale. Annual cycles further expand the impact of the project to a regional scale.
We have responded to our urban misfit of a site, its flatiron slice of Reading’s history, with a layered, diverse and accommodating project. Its vitality is revealed by the complexity and sophistication of the interwoven time cycles that interact with it.
45 High Street. Originally, a site of unrealised potential. Program shifts from aging commercial, to a more public and visible commercial, retail and residential. Surface parking is garaged and screened. Density is increased, enlarging and engaging the immediate community. Everything that was there is still there, with an added dynamism that comes from time scales and cycles, material complexity and a more focused architectural form.
45 High Street. Originally, a site of unrealised potential. Program shifts from ageing commercial, to a more public and visible commercial, retail and residential. Surface parking is garaged and screened. Density is increased, enlarging and engaging the immediate community. Everything that was there is still there, with an added dynamism that comes from time scales and cycles, material complexity and a more focused architectural form.
JEFFREY OLINGER AIA is principal of Olinger Architects, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a firm committed to designing projects that unlock the civic potential of each site.
