Boston Tech Center Redevelopment | 176 Lincoln Street | Brighton

#bancars said:
Outside of the Seaport I don't think any neighborhood in the City will look more different than it does now in 10 years than Allston. Lots of exciting stuff happening!
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You can also add in the NorthPoint-to-Somerville corridor there, too.

Amazing era.
 
BCDC:

bpda.app.box.com

20210126 BCDC Design Committee Presentation 176 Lincoln St.pdf | Powered by Box

bpda.app.box.com bpda.app.box.com

I'm curious that they didn't update their neighborhood massing diagram to include their own project, but it goes a long way toward illustrating Everett Street's future as a high spine. Presumably the Star Market parcel has a similar future.

Also, this is the first time I've seen any project in this area admit that they're next door to the Scientologists.
 
I'm not a fan of the updates. I like the more industrial look of the first image.

Old Image
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New Image:

LincolnStreetNew.jpg
 
Yeah, a nice, well-designed industrial facade has a lot going for it, particularly in Brighting. Unless they have some kind of headquarters tenant like NB across the way, that one feels totally overwrought.
 
Java King said:
I'm not a fan of the updates. I like the more industrial look of the first image.

Old ImageView attachment 9917

New Image:

View attachment 9918
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I like the building on the left more than in the original. The stuff on top gives off the vibe of crazy hair. Don't particularly like the brown coloring on the right building though.
 
The one on the right became cheap and bland looking; the one on the left screams "look at me" instead of being a good urban neighbor. What a step back,
 
estyle said:
Yeah, a nice, well-designed industrial facade has a lot going for it, particularly in Brighting. Unless they have some kind of headquarters tenant like NB across the way, that one feels totally overwrought.
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Someone must have given the architect a Frank Gehry coffee table book for the Winter Solstice
 
I've read many comments on aB about where suburban office park designs belong. The first designs are more suburban, unobtrusive and functional, something a Burlington 2030 committee would love. The new designs are much more reflective of Brighton as a growing part of Boston, and as test cases for future bold designs around it.
 
HarvardP said:
I've read many comments on aB about where suburban office park designs belong. The first designs are more suburban, unobtrusive and functional, something a Burlington 2030 committee would love. The new designs are much more reflective of Brighton as a growing part of Boston, and as test cases for future bold designs around it.
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HarvardP -- much of what you will see here in AB is about context and precedence

You need to look at the history of suburban office parks in Greater Boston which were derived from suburban industrial parks in Greater Boston -- essentially where they began:

Industrial Parks began when the limited access incarnation of Rt-128 opened Post WWII which allowed old and new companies [e.g. Raytheon, Sylvania] to build modern industrial buildings on virgin territory [OK farmland]
The key characteristic of these buildings was large footprints and typically one or two floors in a roughly square shape -- to optimize material handling and machine layout over the traditional urban factories [e.g. Waltham Watch] which had been organized around natural light and line shafts for motive power [the ultimate incarnation being the textile mills in Lowell and Lawrence. Rt-128 began to sprout industrial parks which all mostly looked alike -- a bunch of individual factories surrounded by parking on a rough grid of internal streets connected by one or two entrance streets to the basic town road network -- e.g. Nordblom's Northwest Park in Burlington located off Middlesex Turnpike
from their website

History

www.nordblom.com www.nordblom.com
1955-1960 Developed Northwest Park - one of the first modern suburban parks in partnership with George Macomber upon the completion of Boston’s first circumferential highway, Route 128/I-95.
1970's Completes its 40th and last R&D building at Northwest Park.
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As the businesses in the Boston Area became less focused on mass manufacturing and more on technological innovation -- there was more and more need for office space to house engineers and support personnel and less need for factory floor space.
DEC being a prime example as in a decade their prime product [VAX super minicomputer] shrank from two dozen wire-wrapped circuit boards each over a foot square with hundreds of chips on each to a single printed circuit board [a bit larger than your outstretched hand] with essentially a handful of chips -- and yet it had several hundred times the performance of the original. Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of DEC told me personally in 1990 that he could build all of the computers the world would ever need without hiring another person for the factory work.

Developers began to build new parks along Rt-128 and then I-495 with most of the buildings being offices or office / R&D space -- but they mostly followed the original model of squarish low buildings surrounded by lots of parking because the land was relatively cheap
The first couple of examples of the next evolution into corporate office campuses were provided by Sun Microsystems in Burlington [now Network Drive] designed for a single tenant and the New England Executive Park next to the Burlington Mall designed for multiple tenants -- but mostly single tenant buildings.
These office parks could be as big as a downtown skyscraper in floor area [e.g. New England Executive Park is over 1.2 Million sq ft in 13 buildings] but the floor area was distributed amongst mostly low buildings although New England Office Park had one "Suburban Skyscraper" of about 12 floors
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and Bay Colony a cluster of 3 and 4 story brick and glass buildings huddled into and on the hillside behind the Cambridge Reservoir on Winter St. in Waltham -- now owned by Boston Properties. This one took advantage of the free parkland and vistas courtesy of the Cambridge Reservoir to deliver something unique in terms of Suburban Office Park

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Note there is an adjacent Office Park on lower numbers of Winter St. called Reservoir Woods [visible to the left center in the photo] -- which houses among other companies the corporate HQ of Raytheon


A few buildings designed for specific clients were totally different such as the North American HQ for Dassault Systèmes the French Aerospace aerospace software company [the parent company is responsible for the Mirage fighter and the Exocet cruise missle] along Wyman St. in Waltham [inside the 70's/80's era Hobbs Brook Park] which features a fountain / waterfall right on the property boundary

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Then all of a sudden [2010] -- everything was about downtowns and the evolution of the tech company worker profile from the suburban family man to the young, hip, latte-swilling urbanite. The suburban developers saw the handwriting or the vacancy rate and started to rebuild and repurpose the office parks with more amenities and more urban style roads, and taller buildings. However, more changes were in the pipeline such as large floor-plates and more space for bio/pharma with its specialized requirements. So the developers started to rethink and repurpose once again

For example Post -- a redevelopment of the mammoth mail processing center on Smith Street just off Rt-128 in Waltham -- now the home of Boston Dynamics [dancing robots]
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and the redevelopment of one of the original single story Hobbs Brook sites into a 500k sq ft lab/office structure

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Moral of the story -- Cambridge Crossing is not a cliché "Waltham suburban office park" -- but neither do most of the the suburban office parks fit the cliché image either
 
Design aesthetics are different than an urban vs. suburban discussion. I think this is a wonderful proposal and the streetscape and courtyard fit well with a more urban context. For me, maybe it's the angled glass wall on the newer proposal that I don't like. I'm also one of the few that doesn't like the residential building on Pier 4 in the Seaport, and I don't like the redone GE headquarters building on the Fort Point Channel. They all have those angled glass walls that look top-heavy to me. Anyway, the previous design proposal for this Lincoln Street Development had a more pleasing aesthetic in my opinion. The exterior exposed cross-bracing on the 2nd building reminded me of a more industrial feeling. That's just my opinion. For the record, I worked on 128 in Waltham for 14 years, and this proposal is light years ahead of anything in that area.
 
Java King said:
Design aesthetics are different than an urban vs. suburban discussion. I think this is a wonderful proposal and the streetscape and courtyard fit well with a more urban context. For me, maybe it's the angled glass wall on the newer proposal that I don't like. I'm also one of the few that doesn't like the residential building on Pier 4 in the Seaport, and I don't like the redone GE headquarters building on the Fort Point Channel. They all have those angled glass walls that look top-heavy to me. Anyway, the previous design proposal for this Lincoln Street Development had a more pleasing aesthetic in my opinion. The exterior exposed cross-bracing on the 2nd building reminded me of a more industrial feeling. That's just my opinion. For the record, I worked on 128 in Waltham for 14 years, and this proposal is light years ahead of anything in that area.
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JavaK -- I liked the original proposal for this redo of a massive miss circa 2000 and then again a bit later

But as to your comment on Rt-128 -- I think you have to admit that your statement is on the very generalized side. If I was to have to work in the Boston Tech Center Redevelopment @ Turnpike -- I'd rather that I worked in Waltham in: Bay Colony, Post, the new Hobbs Brook or Systèmes and that has nothing to do with how short the commute would be in either case
 
HarvardP said:
I've read many comments on aB about where suburban office park designs belong. The first designs are more suburban, unobtrusive and functional, something a Burlington 2030 committee would love. The new designs are much more reflective of Brighton as a growing part of Boston, and as test cases for future bold designs around it.
Click to expand...

Respectfully, there's nothing about the first proposal that is suburban. Understated design =/= suburban. From an urbanism standpoint, there's a streetwall, no excessive setbacks, and the separate buildings are densely clustered. From a solely aesthetic standpoint, the design wasn't even that understated; they incorporated facades with more depth than we commonly see today and interesting industrial motifs.They appeared suburban to the extent that they are ~8 story free standing office buildings.

The new proposal screams "look at me!", but that's about all it does for me personally.
 
The new version does have an outre angular "look at me" building.......... I'm not crazy about it, but the Turnpike is a far more proper context than say Commonwealth Ave BU Central......and yes, I'm looking at YOU, BU Stack o' Storage Containers Data Sciences Building.
 
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stellarfun said:
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That huge Saarinen screen is evocative of a science cathedral. Suggests there is a prospective tenant who will be venting, or chilling, -- a lot.
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Unless its a Corporate HQ -- like the Novartis Lab HQ in Cambridge -- that extra-stuff is unnecessary and silly
 
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