Boston Architects: The Emerging and The Emerged

[briv]

The Architectural Record has posted a bunch of Boston-centric articles in response to the city's hosting of this year's AIA Expo. Here's one in which they spotlight some of the more noteworthy local talent:

The New Establishment Meets The Next Wave



Boston?s young and mid-career practices find common ground in their training and research-based design.

By Hubert Murray, AIA


The bold cantilever of Diller Scofidio + Renfro?s Institute of Contemporary Art thrusting over the waters of Boston Harbor revealed to locals that there could indeed be life beyond brick [RECORD, March 2007, page 108]. There is also something happening in Boston from the bottom up, an effervescence of local firms, startups that promise to sweep away some of the cobwebs that still accrue to the ?Athens of America.?

Among the emerging generation, the firm with perhaps the highest profile is H?weler & Yoon [RECORD, November 2007, page 190; December 2007, page 82]. Eric H?weler, as it happens, worked at Diller Scofidio + Renfro between 2002 and 2005. Meejin Yoon, meanwhile, is an alumna of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). The majority of other young practices in Boston also trace a lineage to Harvard?and to Machado and Silvetti Associates, formed in 1985 and arguably Boston?s most influential firm of the last generation. Through teaching at Harvard and maintaining an active practice, Rodolfo Machado, Assoc. AIA, and Jorge Silvetti, FAIA, have influenced established young firms, including Office dA and designLAB, and more recently, Utile. It is not that one can map a stylistic coherence derived from the parent firm?s pedagogical and professional ascendancy. It is more an attitude of research and enquiry, of historical understanding and the power of analytical abstraction that explores the possibility of building in a contemporary idiom within the framework of a strong cultural heritage and a demanding physical fabric.
Harvard, MIT, and Boston?s four other architecture schools draw students from all over the world, many of whom remain in the area to pursue their careers. Thus, while the city?s architecture is often viewed as parochial, conservative, and restrained, its architects have an international diversity and sophistication constantly replenished and reoxygenated by the opportunities to teach and by the new graduates and ideas coming out of the schools. In this academic and professional symbiosis there is also a propensity for research-based design. Office dA, for instance, engages in formal and textural experimentation, reflected also in the work of younger firms, such as Merge and Studio Luz. Almost without exception, the principals of today?s young practices included on the following pages teach in area schools.
The Boston Society of Architects (BSA)?the local chapter of the AIA?and ArchitectureBoston magazine have acted as a public grandstand and salon for Boston?s mainstream architects, but a new generation of young practitioners has decided to throw its own party. Impatient with the normative tendencies of more established practices, emerging firms such as Studio Luz, Merge, and others have combined to kick over the traces of professional conformity by encouraging and exhibiting design in all its facets and embracing cultural polemic. The pinkcomma gallery and its publications, affiliated with the practice over,under, are part of this movement?as is the installation titled Young Boston at the American Institute of Architects 2008 National Convention here this month. While this is a continuation of academic culture by other means, what is remarkable?and perhaps distinctively Bostonian?is the degree of collaboration and mutual support in getting this movement going.
As interesting as the new wave is, one still has to ask why cutting-edge Boston architects are more honored in other parts of the country and overseas than perhaps they are here, at least when it comes to major buildings. Office dA has broken the mold in the private sector with the Macallen Building Condominiums in South Boston. But as far as public buildings are concerned, there is no Bostonian equivalent of New York City?s prequalification program for young, interesting firms that has opened opportunities to Boston-based Kennedy & Violich as well as Ted Galante, AIA, to design municipal buildings. Public and private investors in Boston have still for the most part been unwilling to depart from the formal stereotypes of brick and pitched roofs. So while the emerging firms? frisky conversation on style is a welcome addition, the history of this city of revolutionary nonconformists suggests?and the future surely demands?much bolder thinking.
Members of the newly emerged generation of Boston architects would cavil with the notion that they are in any way a new establishment?a common theme in all of these practices is not one of style but the imperative for constant critical enquiry. If there is any merit in the attempt to identify a DNA of Boston architecture, it is to find it in the uniform rejection of such complacent categorization.





Anmahian Winton Architects
Alex Anmahian, AIA, and Nick Winton, AIA, graduated from the Harvard GSD in 1990 and a year later formed their partnership, now a 14-person firm. Most of their current work is with local universities and institutions or private residences. They?ve also worked in Lebanon, where Anmahian has family ties. Unashamedly Modernist in their philosophy, they are now in a position where they can choose to work with those who are ready to engage with them in architectural discussion. Anmahian cites the Community Rowing Boathouse as the outcome of architect and client engaging in vigorous debate on building a 21st-century facility on a ?19th-century river.?

Nick Winton, AIA, and Alex Anmahian, AIA

Photo ? Anmahian Winton Architects
Recent Boston-area projects by Winton and Anmahian, include a horticultural support building at Harvard University?s Arnold Arboretum.

Photo ? Anmahian Winton Architects
A new boathouse for the group Community Rowing.

Photo ? Anmahian Winton Architects
Staff offices for the American Meteorological Society, located inside a former carriage barn, designed by Charles Bulfinch in 1806, next to Bulfinch?s famed Harrison Gray Otis House in Beacon Hill.

Brian Healy Architects
A graduate of Penn State and Yale, Brian Healy, AIA, set up his practice in 1988. He says the attraction of Boston was ?the intense culture of astute, well-educated people,? as well as the legacy of Le Corbusier, Sert, and others within the historic fabric of the city. Healy relishes the challenge of developing ?a contemporary language in a traditional setting? and finds this skill translatable to the work his office has up and down the East Coast. Even with a firm of eight, Healy finds the time to teach, to serve as president of the BSA, and to run the society?s ?Conversations? series of evening seminars with leading designers.

Photo ? Brian Healy Architects

Photo ? Brian Healy Architects
During warmer months at the Mill Center for the Arts, in Hendersonville, North Carolina, doors to the main indoor performance hall are opened to link that space with an outdoor amphitheater.

Photo ? Brian Healy Architects
Healy recently designed a children?s chapel addition to the Korean Church of Boston in Brookline, Massachusetts.



designLAB architects
Robert J. Miklos, FAIA, and Scott Slarsky, both mid-careerists with considerable experience in Boston firms, founded designLAB in 2004. They have managed to attract major cultural and educational clients all over the country. The name designLAB reflects the principals? commitment to ?design as a vehicle for helping institutions do their job,? Miklos says. Generating form is not their primary goal. Rather, they see their research and critical analysis of a client?s program as the starting point for design process and architectural resolution. Miklos also takes pride in the nonhierarchical, nimble, low-overhead quality of the 10-person firm?qualities he seeks to maintain even as it grows.

Photo ? Peter Vanderwarker
designLAB principal Robert J. Miklos, FAIA, designed the headquarters for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts to achieve a LEED Silver rating.

Photo ? Peter Vanderwarker
Expressing the client?s green values, the building is composed of three wood-clad volumes that encircle a reclaimed brownfield, providing a central open space where staff can gather.

Photo ? Peter Vanderwarker
Expressing the client?s green values, the building is composed of three wood-clad volumes that encircle a reclaimed brownfield, providing a central open space where staff can gather.





Kennedy & Violich Architecture
Sheila Kennedy, AIA, from the Sorbonne, and Frano Violich, AIA, from Berkeley, met at the Harvard GSD. After graduating, they established, in 1988, a ?proactive, research-based practice,? suspicious of ?the complacency of accepted ideas? and ?daring to be different.? The firm has earned a national reputation as an innovative practice engaged in research and product design fully integrated into architecture, at the same time maintaining its intensity by staying small, with just 14 people. Their work on integrating distributed energy generation systems into their architecture is manifested in their ?Portable Light? project and on a larger scale with the as-yet-unbuilt East 34th Street Ferry Terminal in Manhattan.

Photo ? Bruce Martin
Frano Violich, AIA, and Sheila Kennedy, AIA

Photo ? Bruce Martin
Working at a wooded site, Violich and Kennedy, made use of an existing concrete basement foundation to create a three-level studio for a sculptor.

Photo ? Bruce Martin
A large central skylight marks the junction of two wings.

Photo ? Bruce Martin
A plastic fabric forming the roof of the ferry terminal on East 34th Street, in Manhattan, will transmit and reflect daylight, eliminating the need for artificial sources.


Office dA
Both products of the Harvard GSD and the Machado and Silvetti practice, Nader Tehrani and Monica Ponce de Leon founded Office dA in 1991, impatient to build [record, April 2006, page 114; June 2007, page 200]. In their focus on detailing and materials through digital manufacturing, their ambition is to ?marry local craft and tradition to global and contemporary techniques.? Teaching and practice is essential to their work. Tehrani talks of being a ?profound pragmatist? while maintaining a critical edge through ?a constant dissatisfaction with our work.? Their location in Boston was for long merely circumstantial, as they built all over the world and the United States, but their work on the Macallen Building Condominiums has brought with it a new commitment to the city.

Photo ? Office dA
A 2006 competition entry by Office dA principals Monica Ponce de Leon and Nader Tehrani (above) for the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut (next) was inspired by forms in the surrounding trees (this project is unbuilt).

Photo ? Office dA
A 2006 competition entry by Office dA principals Monica Ponce de Leon and Nader Tehrani for the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut was inspired by forms in the surrounding trees (this project is unbuilt).

Photo ? Brandon Clifford
In 2007, Boston?s Institute of Contemporary Art commissioned the Voroduo installation, composed of interlocking acrylic cells.


The Galante Architecture Studio
On graduating in 1993 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Michigan, Ted Galante, AIA, worked there as resident architect for an elementary school designed by The Office of Peter Rose, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he set up his firm. A New Yorker, Galante grew up in a family of builders, learning steel fabrication and construction firsthand. Along with his Cranbrook training, he has an understanding of material and craft that subtly imbues the form and material in his work with reassuring technical competence. While Galante has a local portfolio of private residences and municipal buildings, New York City?s Design Excellence program?through which he has designed three fire stations, among other works?has allowed him to expand his practice geographically.

Photo ? Ron Cowie
Ted Galante, AIA

Photo ? Ron Cowie
For the Free Public Library in Ashby, Massachusetts, Galante designed an 8,000-square-foot addition to a 3,600-square-foot colonial-style building that dates to the 19th century.

Photo ? Ron Cowie
Negotiating the strictures of zoning as well as cultural sensitivities, his 2006 solution was to create a modern interpretation of the post-and-beam barn buildings common to the area.

Photo ? Ron Cowie



Merge Architects
Merge Architects is composed of principal Elizabeth Whittaker, Assoc. AIA?a Harvard GSD graduate who once worked with Brian Healy and, in Los Angeles, with Frank Gehry, FAIA?and vice president Stephen Zecher, with a staff of three. Founded in 2005, it has graduated from designing stylish interiors to a growing portfolio of residential development. Whittaker believes passionately in professional and client collaboration, hence the name of the practice. Her involvement in the BSA, and her leading role in creating the Young Boston installation for this year?s AIA convention, shows Whittaker?s commitment to engaging owners, builders, community, and designers in the ?particularity of a project? as the generative path to high design. Merge experimented with acting as general contractor on some early projects but now prefers a less-ambitious design-build collaboration.

Photo ? John Horner
Elizabeth Whittaker, Assoc. AIA, designed oversize graphic panels for MiniLuxe, that are backlit at night, allowing the space to double as a lounge and private party venue.

Photo ? John Horner
MiniLuxe is a new nail salon prototype in Newton, Massachusetts, opened in 2007. A hybrid program was invented to define the concept of a ?salon.?

Photo ? John Horner
Penn Street Lofts, in Quincy, Massachusetts, consists of six loft-style units, each having single- and double-height spaces that fit together like a puzzle.

Photo ? John Horner
Voids and recessed balconies highlight individual units within the elevatio




O?Hagan Architects
Audrey O?Hagan, AIA, came to the city neither as a student?she graduated from the University of Kansas?nor as a recent graduate, since she had already spent 10 years as an architect in the United Kingdom. Knowing no one here when she arrived, O?Hagan networked through the BSA, became a principal at Stubbins Associates, and eventually set up on her own in 2007. She is already capitalizing on her experience and local contacts, quickly securing commercial commissions as well as the residential and interior work common to start-up practices. What O?Hagan finds attractive in the Boston scene is the constant presence of big name architects working for major institutions, as well as the increasing influence of the smart high-tech and biotech presence in the city. Her work with Stubbins on the Novartis Institutes of BioMedical Research, in Cambridge, represents one outcome of this influence.

Photo ? Jeff Goldberg/Esto
Audrey O?Hagan, AIA

Photo ? Jeff Goldberg/Esto
While at Stubbins Associates, O?Hagan converted an old candy factory into labs for Novartis.

Photo ? Jeff Goldberg/Esto
Her competition entry for the Estonian Academy of the Arts, in Tallinn, allowed her to explore creative ideas?such as a digital ?canvas? on the facade to display student videos.

Photo ? Jeff Goldberg/Esto
She was also able to bolster her portfolio to pursue more educational and cultural clients.



over,under
over,under embodies eclectic practice. Consisting of a British-born Canadian, an Egyptian, a Colombian-born Swiss, and an American?Chris Grimley, Rami el Samahy, Roberto de Oliveira Castro, and Mark Pasnik, respectively?the partnership has woven itself together via Harvard GSD, which three out of its four principals attended, and Machado and Silvetti (four out of four). As if reflecting this polyvalent provenance, over,under invented itself as a multidisciplinary studio for architecture, furniture design, and graphic and Web design, as well as as a publishing and art gallery concern. over,under has designed a residence under construction in Guatemala and is working on a master plan in Qatar. Its pinkcomma gallery has curated exhibitions that include Rethinking City Hall?with ArchitectureBoston?and, with Utile, it has published a compendium of recent Boston residential projects called Urban Housing Atlas. While over,under pursues the realities of practice, pinkcomma is intended as agitprop: an underground organization to foster and recognize a ?more creative, youthful, and experimental scene? in Boston nurtured by the universities.

Photo ? over,under
The partners of over,under?Roberto de Oliveira Castro, Chris Grimley, Rami el Samahy, Mark Pasnik (from left).

Photo ? over,under
In their 2007 design study of Boston?s Brutalist City Hall, the partners of over,under, proposed softening the exterior with canopies.

Photo ? over,under
On the interior, they proposed improving wayfinding with color panels.

Photo ? over,under
The Marina del Sur beach house, under construction in Guatemala near San Jos?, engages with its oceanfront site and climate. Wood screens allow views and ventilation but protect outdoor rooms and the mass of the house from solar heat gain.


Studio Luz
Founded in 2001, Studio Luz is led by husband-and-wife team Anthony Piermarini, AIA, and Hansy Better Barraza, AIA, who met at Cornell and continued through the Harvard GSD together [record, December 2006, page 80]. While cutting their teeth in the profession, Piermarini worked with Kennedy & Violich, and Barraza with Office dA. In their own practice, the formal aspect of their interiors work clearly shows this provenance in the creative use of light and material. But it is through their social engagement that they add another dimension to their portfolio of built projects and installations. In addition to working with nonprofit groups making urban interventions in Boston and Somerville, Massachusetts, Studio Luz has worked with Hope for the Children of Haiti to develop a master plan and design for an orphanage, school, and clinic in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. During an era in which high design and social responsibility often take divergent paths, Studio Luz is a refreshing reminder that these are not mutually exclusive pursuits.

Photo ? John Horner
Hansy L. Better Barraza, AIA, and Anthony Piermarini, AIA

Photo ? Studio Luz
At the Kenmore location of Fins Sushi and Grill, opened in 2008, beams and columns delineate private from public dining spaces and serve as an armature for lighting.

Photo ? Michael Beaman
The plan by Barraza and Piermarini, for Campus d?Espoir, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Photo ? Studio Luz
Campus d?Espoiri locates a school at the heart of a campus that includes a medical clinic and housing for at-risk children.






Utile
Founded in 2002, Utile has four partners, all ex-Machado and Silvetti?Mimi Love, Michael LeBlanc, AIA, Time Love, AIA, and Matthew Littell?and 16 employees. The firm?s approach is to develop a specific expertise in multifamily urban housing and leverage that into the development world and the expanded scope of developer-pragmatic urban design. Utile has now established itself as the leading proponent of edgy, European-style housing throughout the Boston area. Teaching at Northeastern University and, with over,under, publishing the Urban Housing Atlas, are all facets of the firm?s single, focused strategy. Now that the residential market is softening, the practice is taking a similar approach to the commercial market.

Photo ? Robert Knight
Partners Mimi Love, Michael LeBlanc, AIA, Time Love, AIA, and Matthew Littell make up Utile (above, from left).

Photo ? Robert Knight
557-559 East Second Street (above and next), built in 2007, comprises eight single- family row houses located on the cusp of residential and industrial neighborhoods in South Boston.

Photo ? Robert Knight
The design creatively calibrates abutting-edge conditions, the dimensional limits of the residential code, and the chic but parsimonious use of standard materials, which combine to make these units attractive to new homeowners in the city.

One glaring omission from this list, IMO, is Single Speed Design out of Cambridge:

Valentine Houses
Cambridge, MA | 2003

Big Dig Building
Cambridge, MA | 2005
[ Metropolis Next Generation Prize, Holcim Sustainable Construction Award ]

Big Dig House
Lexington, MA | 2006

 

[Lurker]

Oh Hubert, you should have titled your article.

The Emerging and The Emerged and Ethically Challenged.

There's a lot of talent in this article, however some offices listed here partake in less than savory business practices that I wish the BSA and AIA would frown upon. Although, given my own personal background, who am I to judge?

 

[unterbau]

Oh Hubert, you should have titled your article.

The Emerging and The Emerged and Ethically Challenged.

There's a lot of talent in this article, however some offices listed here partake in less than savory business practices that I wish the BSA and AIA would frown upon. Although, given my own personal background, who am I to judge?

Would you care to enlighten us further on this topic?

 

[Lurker]

The charges against the accused are being handled through the proper channels.

I simply don't want the general public to have a grandiose view of these 'artificially' up and coming firms which have some serious failings. To be honest, most of the presented work isn't great either in comparison to work done by the great body of unpublished firms. Many of the best quietly work for the best without a need for fawning attention.

The accolades being given are the result of people being connected to people in a position to publish them as a favor, or have a business interest in doing so. Everyone in practice in this city tends to know everyone else and is at least somewhat aware of the monkey business going on. It's a frustrating situation and it will be resolved with pending action in the appropriate forums. (Obviously not this forum, but legally binding entities)

As for me I never took a job at a firm I didn't think have a strong commitment to ethics. Unfortunately I didn't take such a pledge before partaking in my previous career.

My personal failings stem from my service in the GRU. I spent time in Angola and Ethiopia, doing things that I am going to hell for, before defecting in 1978.