When Michelle Wu exhumed the carcass of Kairos Shen to run the BRA, many of us groaned, because for all the lip service that he pays to "design quality" in his official bio, the Menino-era BRA under his leadership was (in)famous for not caring one whit about aesthetics or the basics of good streetscape. Carport on a major artery? No problem! El Cheapo prefab panels at a major landmark intersection? Sign us up! All that mattered was that favored developers actually got things built and added to the tax rolls, even if the cost of making something infinitely better was trivial (or sometimes nothing) as a fraction of the total. Much as we bemoan the outsized influence of NIMBY neighbors, anyone who has attended a major project review under Shen's leadership has to be shocked at how little time is spent discussing design, and how little sophistication is brought to the discussion that does happen - besides which, everyone cynically knows that changes that Shen's BRA rubber-stamps after approval will end up being cheaper, flatter, and more lifeless than a first proposal that has some interesting features. What Shen once famously expressed in an interview as a preference for "background buildings" (mocked on this site) was in fact really meant as cover for greenlighting the cheapest, most anodyne structures possible. Under Marty Walsh/Brian Golden, the re-branded BPDA did get notably better, even if it was still imperfect (compare, for example, the Kensington and its peers to downtown buildings approved a few years later). As always, the important discussions happened behind closed doors, but under Golden, even some qualified, well-financed developers were told to "try again" before something even got presented to the public. In fairness (?) a building as small as this one is not a priority focus of the BRA, but of course it SHOULD be: this is an extremely prominent setting. But with the difficulty of getting buildings financed in the current environment, and with Shen's extensive track record of indifference to urbanism, we should expect more of this. All that he learned from the Hotel Commonwealth debacle was that "cheap, tacky, and highly visible" needed to be swapped for "cheap, charmless, and incredibly bland." In other cities (e.g., New York) the particulars of architectural proposals are discussed and iterated and picked over by design professionals almost to a fault, but we're never going to get that under this team.
