Affordable Housing Institute : US

By: David A. Smith

“So this unemployed architect walks into a bar and says, ‘our erections can last for years’.” 

 

Okay, maybe not precisely that cheesily, but something similarly whimsical had to have been in the minds of Boston Globe editors when they sent out an offer to under-employed architects, What would you do to beautify under-developed property? 

 

We asked designers to suggest ways to spruce up stalled building projects around the city.

 

Given this, what’s a CAS-CAM designer to do but crank up the fantasies?  As the Globe’s introduction said:

 

The ideas are not restrained by considerations of practicality or cost, and they are not meant to be.

 

Some are reality-based, some float in the Empyrean realms unfettered by the necessity for practicality, like these two:

 

Filene’s design #1: Design firms: Howeler + Yoon Architecture and Squared Design. The team proposes to build a vertical algae-powered bioreactor on the Filene’s site.  The structure would be composed of prefabricated modules, or “eco-pods,” containing materials to manufacture biofuels. The eco-pods would allow scientists to test algae species and methods of fuel extraction. The fuel produced by the algae would power robotic arms that could reconfigure the pods to enhance growing conditions.

 

Reason staggers at the impracticalities of this one. 

 

Why put eco-pods, whatever they are, in stacks that are on the one hand physically inaccessible – so that anything good derived has to be lifted out by antiseptic arachnid arms – and on the other hand in a high-people-traffic area, so that anything bad can infect the maximum number of zombies right away?

 

Rule Number 2: Double Tap

 

Why take really valuable downtown land – it may be idle but it’s not valueless – and use it for something that could be placed anywhere?  Shades of Charles V and the Mezquita of Cordoba.

 

Operator!  Give me the number for 9-1-1!

 

A stalled construction property is unquestionably an eyesore:

 

Stalled site: Filene’s redevelopment, Location: Downtown Crossing, Estimated cost: $700 million, Status: Construction halted in November 2008 (Wendy Maeda / Globe Staff Photo)

 

However, as we saw in temporary permanence, city dwellers rapidly become used to work-in-progress or chiuso per restauro signs, so the eye elides them from our memory – which makes the windblown and trash-accumulating site not an affront to our daily living but merely a civic embarrassment:

 

And I know about embarrassing institutions

 

Only a smidgen less absurd is this one:

 

Filene’s design #11: Designer: William Frese. Frese, who is a sculptor, proposes to turn the Filene’s site into an abstract apothecary chest, evoking the neighborhood’s history in the jewelry trade. The “jewels” and a jeweler’s hand tool would be placed throughout the site.

 

Seeing aside the charming-because-transparent self-interest of a sculptor proposing to turn a construction shell into a rack for macro-sculpture – and where would be get these sculptures, O wise one? – one has the sense that this contributor knows full well this is a fantasy.

 

Or to be more precise, an architectural folly, for which there is a long and rich tradition.  A folly is a small building with no practical purpose at all, placed into a landscape to provide physical piquancy.  Some are purely visual, placed to create a natural vista or strolling point in a large garden:

 

Stowe Rotunda

 

Others stand like monument to childhood:

 

Broadway Tower, Moreton-in-Marsh, Cotswolds

 

Many follies are consciously self-deprecating, like this monument to architecture from Auckland, New Zealand:

 

Former headquarters, Bank of Ozymandias

 

Most follies result from personal wealth and architectural penury, but some are products of personal obsession, like the Watts Towers of Sam Rodia:

 

Watts Towers

 

Rodia called his creation Nuestro Pueblo (’our town’) and as the Watts Tower Web site puts it, “when he was asked why he made the towers, he answered, ‘I wanted to do something big and I did it.’” 

 

Even follies require maintenance, though, which is why this one is beyond folly:

 

Filene’s design #2: Architect: Christopher Golden. Design firm: Carol R. Johnson Associates. Golden, a landscape architect, proposes to fill the void in Downtown Crossing with a waterfall and urban oasis. The waterfall would drop from the side of the Filene’s building and cascade into a swimming pool, which would be surrounded by a sandy beach. At night, lights and music would emanate from the core of the Filene’s building.

 

Any property owner knows that a swimming pool is a hole in the ground into which one pours money.  They cost money to build; cost money to operate; have ongoing maintenance problems; create liability risk; and more than likely, reduce your property’s value upon sale. 

 

Add to that the impossibility of keeping clean a public-use swimming pool in the middle of a bustling city, with all its attendant risks:

 

 

And a beach?  We can safely consign this one to the world of fantasy – a wonderful place to imagine or experience vicariously (the lure of travel writing), but not to visit on one’s own.

 

Then there’s this wishful exercise:

 

Filene’s design #6: Architect: Travis Ewen. Design firm: Carol R. Johnson Associates.  Ewen, a landscape architect, proposes to create an urban garden on the Filene’s site with wind turbines and solar panels to be supported by the existing buildings.

 

Setting aside the implausibility of cows wandering Washington Street, if we can’t place wind turbines in the relative isolation of Martha’s Vineyard, what makes one think that the NIMBYism will be any less potent in the middle of downtown Boston?

 

Moving from the realm of the infeasible to the charmingly useless, we have this:

 

Filene’s design #5: Architect: Cynthia Bubb. Bubb proposes a bike park on the Filene’s site, along with a large projection screen to show movies at night. Along the bike path, Bubb suggests wrapping the Filene’s construction site with a fence made of perforated aluminum, painted or imposed with a scene from a forest. The construction site itself would become an urban parking lot for bicycle commuters, with a large movie screen in front of the Burnham building for people to watch films at night. A grass berm at right would accommodate viewers and picnickers.

 

The problem here is not infeasible but inutility and scale – as in, there isn’t any.  The Filene’s site is maybe fifty yards across, making a bike path scarcely long enough even to start you rolling.  You could walk across the site faster than you could mount a bike, ride it, and dismount. 

 

Nor is shackling bicycles a good use.  I work within three hundred yards of the Filene’s shell, and while I see the occasional bicycle, there’s no indication anywhere that bike-racking is a pressing need. 

 

As for ‘large movie screen for people to watch films,’ when was the last time you or anybody you know gathered in a plaza, the Esplanade, the Boston Common, or another picnic grounds to watch a movie outdoors?  Drive-in movies are dead, and for good reasons.  If there’s a metaphor for the twenty-first century’s home entertainment options, it’s the home theater.

 

High-tech entertainment … circa 1955

 

The architect, in other words, has taken an empty site and overlaid on it a currently-fashionable idea (urban bikes) with a conveniently visual illusion (an outdoor movie screen).  It’s harmless but it’s pointless.

 

Shifting from downtown – prime retail, office, or residential land – to a clearly underused spot, we swing now to the Columbus Center area.  Back in the 1950’s, America and most of the developed world embarked on the Great Urban Highway Mistake, putting concrete ribbons over, around, and through most of our cities – and in traffic, pollution, and urban dysfunctionality we’ve been paying ever since. 

 

Stalled site: Columbus Center. Location: Between Arlington and Clarendon streets over the Massachusetts Turnpike. Estimated cost: $800 million. Status: Construction was stopped more than a year ago as developers search for funds to resume the development. Meanwhile, the state has said it will pay to undo construction work at the site, which has been the subject of many neighborhood complaints. (Wendy Maeda / Globe Staff Photo)

 

Count me among those who would love to see established ugly necessities like the Massachusetts Turnpike covered over, Big-Dig-style, both to hideaway the arterials and to create valuable walkable new-urbanist land.  Such land costs money – the curse of too much value – and hence construction starts only in the boomiest of booms, and stalls in the breathiest of downturns.  It would be nice to have the site developed, but in the meantime, can we really imagine something like this?

 

Columbus Center design #1: Architect: Chris Reed. Design firm: Stoss Landscape Urbanism. Reed proposes suspending an energy-producing public garden from latticework over the Massachusetts Turnpike at Columbus Center. The latticework supports a field of microturbines that harness wind created by passing vehicles; it also supports walkways connecting the Back Bay and South End neighborhoods.

 

With this conception, we find ourselves back in the land of gravity-defying phantasms.  It’s a lovely visual – one can imagine the Disney bluebirds chirping – but ‘energy producing public garden’?  In downtown Boston?  ‘Wind created by passing vehicles’?  As if that would flow in a harnessable direction instead of simply swirling, as it now does.  (If one wanted to harness vehicular wind effects, the place for turbines would be at tunnel entrances and exits, but in fact fans are placed into those tunnels precisely because vehicles merely displace air, they create no steady breeze.)

 

Then there’s this mixture of the inexpensive and the unhygienic:

 

Filene’s design #3: Design firm: Utile Inc. Utile Inc., an urban planning firm, proposes to install crisscrossing boardwalks across the Filene’s site that would provide new shortcuts through Downtown Crossing. Below the boardwalk would be a manicured pasture fit for sheep and other livestock that used to roam the nearby Boston Common.

 

Nothing wrong with crisscrossing boardwalks except the legal risks.  I cannot imagine that the site’s insurers would be comfortable with pedestrians walking in proximity to an unreinforced building shell.  But sheep grazing underneath?  Why?  For their manure?

 

They’ll work in downtown Boston!

 

By now readers may be wondering why I’ve double-pumped so many shotgun shells into these helpless barrel-bound fish.  The reason is simple – these designs were offered, if not by their architects then by the Globe, as physically doable.  Somebody thought they could in fact be built, and inviting a referendum on them:

 

Boston’s stalled construction sites — from the site of the former Filene’s building to Harvard’s stalled science center in Allston — have become eyesores dotting the city’s landscape. The Globe’s Casey Ross asked some local artists and architects to reimagine these stalled projects and come up with ideas to make them part of the city’s culture again. Click through for a variety of renderings and ideas, and vote on which Filene’s site design and which design among the other stalled projects you like the most.

 

Then, submit your own rendering of your designs for one of Boston’s stalled sites.

 

There is, of course, a serious point to all this folly.

 

No, really, we’re about to become serious

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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