424 Mass Ave

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justin

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Any pics of this?

justin

ARCHITECTURE
Fitting in with the South End neighbors
424 Mass. Ave. has historic context and modern flair
By Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent | January 28, 2007
The great psychoanalyst Eric Erikson said it best. He wrote: "Play needs firm limits, then free movement within these limits. Without firm limits there is no play."

Without limits, play is meaningless. Without a court and a net, you can't play tennis. How would you know when you'd made a good shot?
It's the same in architecture. Case in point: the modest but fascinating new dwelling at 424 Massachusetts Avenue in the South End.
Here the "firm limits" are the rules of the South End Landmark District Commission, which the architect was required to respect. And "play" describes the inventive things he did within these rules.
The architect is Doug Dolezal of Boston. His building looks, at first glance, like two townhouses. But it's actually a single building, five stories with an elevator, with parking in the basement. There are 10 condos, two per floor. The site had been a vacant lot for half a century.
Dolezal could have chosen to simply copy the appearance of the beloved South End redbrick bow - front houses, built in the 1850s. That's what timid architects sometimes do.
Or he could, instead, have tried to disrupt the historic context with something new and flashy. That's what creative architects often do.
Instead, he did something more interesting. He made an obviously new building that picks up many of the traditional themes of the neighborhood. It's contextual without being copycat. It's like the kind of guest you want at your party, polite and surprising at the same time.
Dolezal continues the building heights and the very human scale of the old South End. He uses red brick, too. But he finds ways of letting you know that the brick walls aren't holding up the building, as they did in the old days. The brick of Dolezal's exterior is divided into a grid of panels by horizontal lines of concrete, thus subtly suggesting the hidden structural steel frame that is really supporting the building.
He uses bow - fronts, too, but gives one of them a bold, freely shaped, asymmetrical curve that immediately suggests a contemporary eye.
It's the same with other details. Dolezal recaps the decorative brickwork of neighboring buildings, but does it in a more abstract, more modern way. When you look closely, his brick details have a crisply crafted elegance.
And instead of traditional double-hung windows, Dolezal uses vertical steel casements. They not only look much more modern -- and, again, suggest the steel frame within -- but they also work better: They lock tight to save energy by shutting out the weather.
Part of any architecture is simple problem-solving. Somehow, on this small site, Dolezal had to figure out how to fit two fire stairs, one elevator, and two livable condos onto each floor. It's a Rubik's Cube problem he solves with panache. The resulting dwellings are a little tight on storage, but they're delightful to be in. And the two top-floor units, each with a private roof garden, are gems.
Four-twenty-four is the product of democratic negotiation. The Landmark Commission didn't much like Dolezal's casement windows, but eventually accepted them. Dolezal doesn't much like his own roofscape, which, in a fussy way, tries to remind you of the mansards and little attic towers of the past. He'd like to have made his bow - fronts bigger, too, and bolder in shape.
He'd like, in short, to have been more original. The commission would have liked to be more traditional.
The result is a building that embodies the tension and vitality of real life. It's a model for infill buildings in historic neighborhoods -- not in its architecture, necessarily, but in its respect for both the present and the past.
It's a pleasure to report that in a city where the debate between modernists and traditionalists is often heated, 424 won an award for good design from the Boston Preservation Alliance.
Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.
? Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
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I'll hit it up today.

Dolezal could have chosen to simply copy the appearance of the beloved South End redbrick bow - front houses, built in the 1850s. That's what timid architects sometimes do.
Or he could, instead, have tried to disrupt the historic context with something new and flashy. That's what creative architects often do.
Click to expand...

Talk about being blunt!
 
Robert Campbell is right - this is a great looking project.







 
Wonder why he wrote the article now? This building has been complete for at least 2 years.

I like the building and assumed it most have won and award, but I didn't see anything like that mentioned in the article.
 
It's innocuous, but it says something about Boston architecture that Campbell considers this to not be conservative.
 
How can casement windows be conservative?!?

justin
 
Hey, someone finally got how to do this kind of project right. Nice.
 
I use conservative here to mean timid and restrained, not traditionalist in the strictest sense.
 
Very, very nice indeed.

This is the kind of building and increment of development we should be seeing in the Seaport District and NorthPoint. It would be even better with some ground floor retail.
 
Wow, wonderful. I pass through here several times a week and have never stopped to notice this building; how very contextual.
 
Now that gas station on the corner of Columbus and Mass Aves might be a good place for an interesting contemporary stucture.
 
It's a "background" building. Most buildings in a city are background buildings. They work well for their purposes and fit in without calling attention to themselves.

There are plenty of places where bold "foreground" buildings can be sited, but this isn't one of them.

(What was on this site before?)
 
I'm sure Graham Gund loves it...It's certainly polite, but not my trip...

With the same site constraints and materials, what would Louis Kahn have done? Or Alvar Aalto? Something better than this...
 
Louis Kahn? Something like this:
cid_1863781.jpg


Lets be happy with a filler.
 
I like it except for the front door. And good filler is what separates the great cities from the crappy ones.
 
The building is fine, the problem in that everyone thinks it's something to talk about. It doesn't deserve this much attention, Bob Campbell. Only in Boston would a so-called background building become a 'masterpiece'.
 
The building is fine, the problem in that everyone thinks it's something to talk about. It doesn't deserve this much attention, Bob Campbell. Only in Boston would a so-called background building become a 'masterpiece'.
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And in fact, it hasn't received much attention at all. I had never seen or heard of this building before Campbell's article. No one is calling it a masterpiece, but it is very well done. Instead of focusing on the buildings everyone knows about, Campbell is trying to educate the public on the fact that background buildings, such as this one, are just as important to the city fabric as the more prominent buildings.
 
There is a building going up now under similar circumstances near the corner of Beacon St. and Park Ave. Unlike the Mass Ave building it's only a single lot but it is flanked on both sides by pre war buildings. The steel is already up but I'm not sure what the final design will look like.

Coincidentally the same thing was going on a few years ago just down the street across from the St. Mary's T stop. There was a single lot and they put up a modern structure with alot of exposed concrete but it was torn down before it was completed and replaced with something that blends in with its surroundings.
 
I like it except for the front door.
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agreed. One of the greatest parts of "Boston architecture" in the 4-5 storey brick buildings such as this one is the prominent front doors and stairways which they have. This one is nestled into the building itself, and is very un-grand. Oh well, that certainly doesn't kill the building
 
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