Arboretum Place

The MBTA alone is enough to support a 100 man business with their timeline changes.
 
Agreement: The Arborteum Place designs look like cheap commercial strip-mall architecture. No respect for the local styles or history, and like Vinnie Marino's many developments in Roslindale, this project sucks the character out of the locale. Architect Ed Forte is responsible for several of the uglier buildings in Jamaica Plain.
 
Somebody is picketing the site this morning. Looks like maybe they didn't go with union labor because the work crews are still trying to be active. Alternatively, the picketers are not union and mad about something else. I only got a quick glance, long enough to see that the pickets were blocking access for heavy equipment (and totally messing with Washington St. traffic). The signs said something about local workers for local jobs. Probably 20 to 30 people on the line.
 
Lrfox said:
^Notice how every one of them all but completely ignores the street/pedestrian. There may be a reason for it that I'm not aware of, but the top one even goes to great lengths to make sure that the building is cut off from the street.
Click to expand...


The top one, "going great lengths," is about 100 years old, and was there before the street was. And I'm not sure exactly how you want a building to be 'aware of pedestrians. The building serve their purpose - they are not intended to be walked on.
 
Wow, so I take it that given the comments below you are all a bunch of ranting neighbors, students or suffer from some other unfortunate disorder.

I drove through JP this year to the refreshing sight that the WCI and Forte Architecture team had graced the dated forest hills complex with. Challenging sites to say the least, the development of this site brings a new edge to an otherwise back of house entry into the train station and bus terminal.

Sorry, but I lived in JP for a while, and along with the many other places I have lived across the globe, JP has something special - but it wasn’t forest hills.

The signature Forte mixture of materials and layered facades that Arboretum Place has brought to this side of the station, brings new life, and a potential “bridge building” joining the neighborhoods of Roslyndale and JP, something the elevated highway had broken and Forest Hills had ignored.

Various comments within this forum don’t seem to even fit what I see now at the site, the comment on pedestrian traffic and the building stepping back from any connection cant be directed toward Arboretum Place, with its ground floor store front retail presence? If the comments are directed toward another WCI / Forte Architecture project reference with photos as probably 500 Amory Street, this project is obviously steered by the site topography, and extension of existing parking under the building created a raised first floor level above the sidewalk. If i were looking at this space to lease for a business, I would prefer the disconnect here, as an office building at zero lot line would be distracting on the first floor, and the higher first floor windows allow for the introduction of natural light into the space, without the typical necessity of god awful mini blinds, typically found at ground floor office suites. The other building photographed at Green Street T Station was originally designed for Medical Use, if you know anything about that, it’s not beneficial to have first floor exam rooms that feel like the Macy’s window display at downtown crossing.

All in all most of the comments here don’t seem to relate to the project at all, or they widely jump around mis-referencing other projects, without any real analysis. I am sure that most here haven’t even visited the actual site, and made random comments just to keep the banter going. But in doing so you mis-represent work to others that read your posts, over a development that ultimately has a positive impact on the communities we live in. These projects have brought jobs to the community both in their construction and their permanent use. The teams involved are not major corporations, they are local JP businesses that have developed JP over the past few decades with buildings that are appropriate for the areas in which they are sited, and will continue to evolve the JP aesthetic.

Really guys, if you need to rant about something look at our government, our environment, our education and health care systems, you know something worth ranting about. If every building looked the way you wanted it to, it would be a pretty mundane world. JP is a community with a celebrated diversity, give its built environment and the designers that make great efforts to create such spaces, the same liberty.
 
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