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The Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) has named architect and academic Rahul Mehrotra as the new Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the school. Mehrotra is also being named to the position of John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and... View full entry
A city review of design for The Pinnacle at Central Wharf, a high performance mixed-use tower on the Boston waterfront, is underway. Led by developer The Chiofaro Compant and architects Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), the new tower will replace a 7-story parking garage that currently sits on the site in... View full entry
According to a recent article from The Boston Globe, due to city's "hot" real estate market, which has "prompted a number of developers to tear down and build up," the Governor's office now wants to get in on the action. On Wednesday, the Baker administration unveiled plans to redevelop the... View full entry
“We are building a 100-year building. We want to make sure it will last 100 years, but well beyond that,” explained William R. Halter, an architect for Elkus Manfredi, the firm behind the building’s design. — CBS Boston
Elkus Manfredi's design for the St. Regis Residences allows the lowest floor of the 22-story luxury tower to be permanently be raised by up to five feet without disturbing the building's two-story ground-level restaurant. The design was created to allow the building to adapt to rising sea... View full entry
A widespread over-supply of parking in metro Boston residential developments is driving up the cost of housing and may encourage people to own cars who otherwise would not, according to a new study by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. — CommonWealth
What’s the true cost of parking? In 2014, Sarah Goodyear wrote a piece for CityLab titled "How Parking Spaces are Eating Our Cities Alive" that provides a framework for answering the question. In her article, Goodyear discusses how the average parking space takes up about 300 square feet, or... View full entry
The National Trust for Historic Preservation has unveiled $1.6 million in grant funding dedicated to preserving historical sites that demonstrate significance with relation to Black history and African American cultural heritage from around the country. The funding, part of a larger, multi-year... View full entry
Big Plans: Picturing Social Reform, an exhibition currently on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, examines how landscape architects and photographers concretized contemporary social critiques through their work in American cities during the late 1800s and early... View full entry
All over town, buildings sit empty, somehow unused despite a fierce shortage of housing and a long-running development boom that has transformed long-quiet patches of the city into hot property. [...]
Some are better kept than others. Some have more prestigious addresses. But each is a puzzle unto its own.
— Boston Globe
Boston Globe reporter Tim Logan investigates the factors behind Boston's many vacant buildings — despite a booming real estate market. "Even crumbling and empty buildings serve a purpose in a new Boston where so much is shiny and fresh," writes Logan. View full entry
What's in a facade? For those outside the architecture and design profession, the function, importance, and commonality facades play in the built environment might not be so clear. But the exterior wall, or "face" of a building, in fact, plays a crucial role in conveying a building's structural... View full entry
The city’s most polarizing building is now officially middle-aged and a couple of fans have reproduced a pin that was given out during its opening week celebrations in 1969 [...]
Joyce Linehan, chief of policy for Boston’s Mayor Marty Walsh, still has an original pin, which local designers Chris Grimley and Shannon McLean used as the basis for a reproduction.
— CityLab
Commemorative pin and letter press drawing card. Image via OverUnder's website"Cast in bronze and hand patina’d, the commemorative lapel pin is produced in a limited edition of fifty," reads the pin's description on the website of OverUnder, the Boston-based architecture and design firm behind... View full entry
The AIA has announced the Boston-based firm Payette as the 2019 Architecture Firm Award recipient. Now in its 56th year, the annual award is the top honor a firm can receive from the AIA, and given in recognition of "a practice that consistently has produced distinguished architecture for at least... View full entry
We wanted architecture that would signal to everyone that this was a special place, the center of campus...We wanted a building that in 2100 would stand up and mark the dynamic change in the University and talk about the century we're in. - Robert A. Brown Boston University President
Boston University and KPMB Architects have announced their plans to construct a 17-floor tower which will house BU's new Data Sciences Center. A program booming within the field of academia, BU plans to be a leader in this area of education. Alongside the team at KPMB, the architecture firm aims... View full entry
The Manhattan skyline is one of the world’s most iconic, but it wouldn’t be complete without the city’s famed residential supertalls. Luxury buildings like 432 Park Ave and One57 have set a high bar in the era of tower living, but the past decade has seen the vertical lifestyle catching on across the globe—from Boston to Monaco to New Orleans. — quartzy.qz.com
Check out these luxury residential skyscrapers outside of NYC: Boston, MA Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, Echelon Seaport is Boston's latest project located in the Seaport District. This new luxury condo and apartment development is currently under construction with a completion date of 2020. ... View full entry
Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) has chosen global infrastructure firm AECOM and luis vidal + architects to handle the remodeling of Boston Logan International Airport’s Terminal E. The team won the design competition due to their collaborative proposal, which also satisfied Massport’s functional requirements. — Commercial Property Executive
This major remodeling of Boston Logan International Airport’s Terminal E will be lead by AECOM as the prime consultant and architect/engineer of record, and airport design specialist luis vidal + architects as the vision architect. A press statement summarizes the proposed improvements: "The... View full entry
How do you raise the standard of living in the poorest neighborhoods in the country?
That’s what community developers, typically nonprofits that build and finance affordable housing, have tried to do over the last few decades. And yet [...] many of these communities remain stuck in poverty. [...]
This problem has stumped community developers for decades. But two local nonprofits think they’ve hit on something: They’ve created a private equity fund.
— marketplace.org
