Trade Secrets | New England Home |November 2015

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November–December 2015

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News from and musings about the New England design community

the iCA on South BoSton’S wAterfront

Building Personality ///////////

By Louis PosteL

M

aybe you remember going down to Boston Harbor as a kid. There was always a super-sized rat trundling along on some crazy errand. Maybe it was always the same rat on the same errand, but there it inevitably was, dodging around heaps of junk: sneakers, six-pack yokes, and oil rags strewn along the shore.

Well, now he’s gone, and his friends are gone. Peer down today through the harbor piers and all you see is clear water.

Not even a gum wrapper, thanks to what stands among this country’s greatest environmental success stories.

But the architecture hugging the shore may prove to be our greatest lost-opportunity story: one bland blue-glass tower after another cropping up from what was Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant to our iconic Design Center. Why would all the boards and commissions allow these featureless, soul-sucking, detail-less towers to happen?

It can take a sheaf of permits, along with some political muscle, to change a window molding on Beacon Hill. Why then have international developers come in essentially unimpeded with recycled, click-cut-paste designs?

Rachel Slade was an architect for Leers Weinzapfel Associates before she became the executive editor at Boston

magazine. “Why Is Boston So Ugly?” she titled a major piece last May. “The forest of elevator cores sprouting around town tells us that we’re living in a once-in-a-lifetime moment—a sugar rush of development unseen here since our parents’ parents’ time. But the dirty little secret behind Boston’s building boom is that it’s profoundly banal—designed without any imagination, straight out of the box, built to please banks rather than people.”

Greg Galer helms the Boston Preservation Alliance. His blog in September gAler picked up where Slade left off: “Boston’s housing needs are clear. But faceless architecture isn’t the answer.” The uninspired condos and apartment buildings going up could be found in “ ‘Anywhere, USA.’ Boston is rapidly losing its personality.”

Too bad, because as baby boomers downsize to try to fulfill their long-held wish to reconnect with the city, where are they going to go? Imagine relocating from a house by a Polhemus Savery DaSilva or a David Hacin to what Slade calls “a relentless gridded box of windows from floor to sky.”

There’s got to be a better way. /// New eNglaNd School of arT aNd deSigN profeSSor Sean Solley, of Barrington, Rhode Island, has just returned from

Berlin, a city that takes its skyline very seriously. A design competition is mandated for every major building, whether public or private, because its presence will affect everyone.

Solley was there in Berlin for the past year studying and trying his hand at the Maker Movement. Given Solley’s enthusiasm, the new maker technologies may represent the best answer yet to the featurelessness of cut-and-paste “Revit Architecture.” Launched experimentally at MIT, maker facilities, Maker Faires, and Fab (fabrication) Labs dedicated to “personal manufacturing” have spread worldwide. 3-D printing, laser cutting, and computerized wood routing have all become surprisingly affordable.

This new phenomenon, says Solley, will be especially critical in advanc3-D Printing At the fAB lAB Berlin

keep iN Touch Help us keep our fingers on the pulse of new england’s design community. Send your news to lpostel@nehomemag.com.

152 New eNglaNd Home november–december 2015

trAde secrets

Tabletop by Didriks

ing his main interest: interdisciplinary collaborations that support universal and sustainable design. “My wife, Katrin, and I found all sorts of scrap from trade fairs around Germany that we intended to make into custom furniture pieces.

The problem was that they were all odd and off-centered,” Solley says. “We readily solved the problem using 3-D printing to produce customized clasps and knuckles at one of the local Fab Labs.” /// A sure wAy to mediocrity is to believe

that one size fits all. “For example,” says designer and staging specialist Kerri Cardi of Wakefield, Rhode Island, “I advise my builder clients that, if you’re marketing to young couples with families, you’re more often selling to the woman than the man. He’s thinking family, which makes the sofa in the family room a first priority. You want her to imagine curling up right there. Next in importance is the dining room and kitchen.”

One builder was about to put the laundry next to the master suite. “This won’t work if your target clients are young couples; they need one place that’s private,” Cardi says. “If they’re older and the kids are gone, however, a laundry in the master makes a lot more sense than having to traipse down to the basement.”

Cardi is intent on serving what she sees as an overlooked market: providing fine furniture that builders can rent for staging purposes, making a custom approach to real estate marketing that much easier.

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Warren Schwartz of schwArtz/silver

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Architects is not alone in sensing how Area Four has become a symbol for an optimistic, youthful Boston, one that seems to have every intent of remaining world-class. What sets Schwartz apart is that he’s designing the new A4 eatery in the Troy Boston building in the South End, while simultaneously designing a new home in the Berkshires for Area Four restaurateur Michael Krupp and his family. “A less exuberant client than Michael might have asked us to perch the house high up on one of the knolls overlooking

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the pond,” Schwartz says. “But not Michael.

He and his wife represent a new generation that believes in doing the extraordinary.

Rather than perching SchwarTz it on one of the knolls, Michael asked me to design his house stretching over two knolls with the pond below. We have even added a zip-line to get you down to the pond fast.” /// afTer ThirTy-Six yearS in The buSineSS,

Liz Goldberg of Hartford, Connecticut,

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finds her design work is now stretching over three generations. Surprisingly, she says, empty nesters aren’t uniformly downsizing in total area lived in, but are instead keeping a condo in the city and a family compound in the country. “One client is downsizing from an 8,000-squarefoot house to a penthouse in the city plus a 5,000-square-foot compound on the Cape,” she says. “Their interest is turning from guests to grandchildren—creating a house that can accommodate many generations to come.” /// a clienT deSigner

Julie Albrecht had

worked with years before found her again via Facebook. The client had since moved to Chicago, but wanted Albrecht to continue helping her. An Internet exchange of idea boards soon followed. Her client was a single mom, working long hours.

She wanted a place to go home to and feel comfortable. No frou-frou necessary. There was one hitch, however: there was no room in the client’s budget to fly Albrecht out to Chicago from Connecticut’s Northeast Corner, where the designer is based. “I was doubtful at first that this would work all by Internet,” said Albrecht. “In fact, I had a clause in our agreement that, if a piece we bought didn’t fit because of an error made in the floor measurements, it would be up to her to return it. Fortunately, my client took really good measurements.” /// aS for boSTon’S building boom, new

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measurements and higher standards of design are clearly in order. The water may be cleaner, but the rat personifying Opportunism and Greed remains in the deep shadows of these gridded boxes.

There’s got to be a better way. •