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Equilibria

Equilibria

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Constellation Center is dead. Long live something else!

Here are the renders. Kenmore Center Phase II made love to MIT Building 5.

www.cambridgeday.com

Gas transfer station is removed in proposal for 250-foot lab tower with public arts space - Cambridge Day

While Cambridge will never get its long-promised Constellation Center, what could go in its place – a 250-foot, three-tiered lab tower with 40,000 square feet of public arts and culture space at its base – offers something new: removal of a gas transfer station from the showpiece Third Street.
www.cambridgeday.com www.cambridgeday.com

The centerpiece is a 300-seat theater, its stage exposed in a jewel box platform floating in a three-story atrium. While the size will be perfect for uses such as the North Cambridge Family Opera (a secondary theater space seating around 150 is also proposed) and rehearsal spaces will accommodate dancers and others being displaced from Central Square, whether there will be long-term residencies for arts companies is “TBD,” BioMed officials say. Rental prices are, like the building, intended to be tiered to ensure affordability.
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That's a little more arts component than I was expecting. Also, no new parking with this building (though the developer's master planned site has garages, but to be fair to them, they built those before they bought this site).

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For the life of me I just don't understand the 250' zoning cap in Kendall. It's one of the most in-demand areas in the entire country, without the FAA issues that plague downtown Boston, and without the shadow issues either. They should be reaching for the stars on these last parcels. This one could literally go 1000'. It blows my mind that they insist on looking like the Seaport, which has strict FAA limits due to the flight paths. Don't they realize the whole area just doesn't look that great, and is underutilized compared to the insane demand? It's a cool looking stump, but it's still a stump so I just can't get too excited. This should be the most prime parcel in the entire commonwealth.
 
As explained by BioMed, the arts and culture space (there is a second theater, 150 seats) and the programming therein will be subsidized by the high rents tenants pay for the lab space. No lab space, no high rents, no arts / culture = empty lot, given the zoning requirement.
 
Equilibria said:
Constellation Center is dead. Long live something else!

Here are the renders. Kenmore Center Phase II made love to MIT Building 5.

www.cambridgeday.com

Gas transfer station is removed in proposal for 250-foot lab tower with public arts space - Cambridge Day

While Cambridge will never get its long-promised Constellation Center, what could go in its place – a 250-foot, three-tiered lab tower with 40,000 square feet of public arts and culture space at its base – offers something new: removal of a gas transfer station from the showpiece Third Street.
www.cambridgeday.com www.cambridgeday.com



That's a little more arts component than I was expecting. Also, no new parking with this building (though the developer's master planned site has garages, but to be fair to them, they built those before they bought this site).

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Kinda reminds me of the BU stack of books
 
....Biomed Realty Thursday evening took the wraps off its plans for a 16-story office and lab building on Third Street in Kendall. It’s much like many of the other mid-rise office and lab towers that have gone up during the tech-and-life-science district’s long-running boom, if perhaps a bit more distinctively designed than most, with sweeping lines dreamed up by CBT Architects.

But there’s one key difference. Much of the lobby will serve as an indoor-outdoor gathering space — a 10,000-square-foot “living room” for Kendall Square, as the Biomed executive who’s leading the project calls it. And upstairs, on the second and third floors, will be a roughly 300-seat, two-story theater, designed to house performing arts groups that struggle to find a home in pricey Cambridge.
........
It’ll stretch between Third Street, where Biomed plans to move a gas transfer station that has long complicated the site’s development, and Kendall Street, a plaza where Biomed operates several other civic spaces in and around other buildings it owns.

The building won’t have parking — though Biomed operates a pair of underground garages nearby, about 2,200 spaces in all. It also won’t be hooked up to natural gas, instead using electricity and a nearby steam plant for heat. Cambridge is considering banning natural gas connections in new buildings citywide, as Brookline recently did.
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www.bostonglobe.com

In this new office building, Kendall Square may get some culture - The Boston Globe

A proposed 16-story lab and office building would also include a public ‘living room’ and a 300-seat theater.
www.bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com
 
DZH22 said:
For the life of me I just don't understand the 250' zoning cap in Kendall. It's one of the most in-demand areas in the entire country, without the FAA issues that plague downtown Boston, and without the shadow issues either. They should be reaching for the stars on these last parcels. This one could literally go 1000'. It blows my mind that they insist on looking like the Seaport, which has strict FAA limits due to the flight paths. Don't they realize the whole area just doesn't look that great, and is underutilized compared to the insane demand? It's a cool looking stump, but it's still a stump so I just can't get too excited. This should be the most prime parcel in the entire commonwealth.
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DZH -- Kendall can command insane level of rents for Labs and quite high rents for offices -- so far the market in Kendall for residences is not like the Seaport or the Back Bay or any of the recent high rise places for residential in Boston.

So if you were to build real tall -- it would have to be something like --1 Dalton: an uber Lux hotel under a bunch of Uber Lux residences -- I don't think that outside of the Volpe development which has one of those planned [500 ft] that you can finance it.

Note that no one has figured out how to build a real tall lab.

On top of that difficulty in blowing air in and out for a tall lab -- the big Bio who can afford to pay Kendall Lab rents want Big Floor Plates -- so the economics for super tall in Kendall just is not there.
 
I guarintee you could fill a tall residential tower here. Its right on kendall station, 3 mins from downtown, right in a job center, a nice area near the river, the views are of Bostons skyline vs from within...
 
stick n move said:
I guarintee you could fill a tall residential tower here. Its right on kendall station, 3 mins from downtown, right in a job center, a nice area near the river, the views are of Bostons skyline vs from within...
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Stick -- there have been a number of opportunities to build a relatively tall residential tower on various parcels -- none have done so

So there has to be a reason why no developer has tried.

MIT is however proposing a tower for the redevelopment of the Volpe site which has the potential to be around 500 feet and there is some support in the Cambridge City Council.
 
^ Its all about highest and best use. As long a lab buildings are making more money than residential buildings then developers are going to build lab. Couple that with the added risk of a condo vs lab building, there are no luxury high rise (condo) precedents in Kendall to show sale values, thus is is hard to underwrite. That and I think a residential building would have to be significantly taller than the existing buildings to get the sale prices to make it work. Again there really are precedents to show the city would be willing to permit those taller buildings. In short, lab is a safer and more profitable investment in Kendall at the moment. I think the city would need to step in, as they have, to push for more residential.
 
^ We’ve been over this a million times, but it is simply not true that all the big money tenants in Kendall demand lab space. I don’t have any hard numbers in front of me, but a significant portion of Cambridge/Kendall demand is straight up office space. Google isn’t using labs, Akamai isn’t using labs, IBM isn’t using labs, Philips isn’t using labs, et cetera et cetera. And even for biotech / pharma tenants, a relatively small percentage of their office demand in Cambridge needs “lab spec” plumbing and ventilation. PLENTY of those workers work at desks.

And for residential, asking rents in brand-new market-rate towers in Kendall typically exceed rents around, say, North Station. But new towers around North Station (which are also height-restricted, by the way, just not as much as in Cambridge) are still about 1.5x the height of those in Kendall. And the Kendall towers go right up to the tippy-top of what is allowed by zoning. This is clear evidence that those Kendall towers would go taller if they were allowed to, but they aren’t.

It is true that it becomes uneconomical and inefficient to build lab space above certain heights. But when it comes to Kendall, these market forces aren’t capping height. Regulation is what caps height in Kendall, full stop. It just so happens that the height to which regulation allows developers to build in Kendall is also a perfect height for labs.

So yes, labs are absolutely “highest and best use” given these height restrictions. But absent those height restrictions, market forces would result in the construction of hotels, residential buildings, and traditional office buildings taller than anything we see in Kendall today. We might, possibly, even get some lab buildings taller than anything else in Kendall today too.
 
JumboBuc said:
^ We’ve been over this a million times, but it is simply not true that all the big money tenants in Kendall demand lab space. I don’t have any hard numbers in front of me, but a significant portion of Cambridge/Kendall demand is straight up office space. Google isn’t using labs, Akamai isn’t using labs, IBM isn’t using labs, Philips isn’t using labs, et cetera et cetera. And even for biotech / pharma tenants, a relatively small percentage of their office demand in Cambridge needs “lab spec” plumbing and ventilation. PLENTY of those workers work at desks.

And for residential, asking rents in brand-new market-rate towers in Kendall typically exceed rents around, say, North Station. But new towers around North Station (which are also height-restricted, by the way, just not as much as in Cambridge) are still about 1.5x the height of those in Kendall. And the Kendall towers go right up to the tippy-top of what is allowed by zoning. This is clear evidence that those Kendall towers would go taller if they were allowed to, but they aren’t.

It is true that it becomes uneconomical and inefficient to build lab space above certain heights. But when it comes to Kendall, these market forces aren’t capping height. Regulation is what caps height in Kendall, full stop. It just so happens that the height to which regulation allows developers to build in Kendall is also a perfect height for labs.

So yes, labs are absolutely “highest and best use” given these height restrictions. But absent those height restrictions, market forces would result in the construction of hotels, residential buildings, and traditional office buildings taller than anything we see in Kendall today. We might, possibly, even get some lab buildings taller than anything else in Kendall today too.
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JumboBuc -- the hard numbers need to be in front of you

Kendall Sq. Lab space vacancy is at 0% + a tiny bit of occasional subleases. The price for these scarce sq.ft. if you can find them is >$100. This tops any other use of the land that's why everyone building is building labs first.

You are right that a lot of the non-bio companies don't need "wet labs." However, many of the other occupants of Kendall Sq. need other kinds of specialized spaces including non-bio labs. Consider for example: Draper Labs, Schlumberger-Doll Research, Akamai, IBM, etc. They need places to stash lots of high value electronics, Start Trek-style "Flight Decks" , back-up power, etc. -- these are not typical "Office spaces"
 
I am legitimately disappointed with this. That space was intended for arts in what is an arts desert. I'm all for the lab tower, but the first three floors of that building should have been dedicated to arts. That would have been a huge contribution to the community. This is yet another lab building in a sea of lab buildings; a drop in the ocean.
 
Gameguy326 said:
I am legitimately disappointed with this. That space was intended for arts in what is an arts desert. I'm all for the lab tower, but the first three floors of that building should have been dedicated to arts. That would have been a huge contribution to the community. This is yet another lab building in a sea of lab buildings; a drop in the ocean.
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??

The city selected the larger of the two proposals, and the project includes an atrium space between 2 and 3 stories specifically for civic use and the arts, a total value of $55 million not toward lab space.
 
Gameguy326 said:
I am legitimately disappointed with this. That space was intended for arts in what is an arts desert. I'm all for the lab tower, but the first three floors of that building should have been dedicated to arts. That would have been a huge contribution to the community. This is yet another lab building in a sea of lab buildings; a drop in the ocean.
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That space was not intended for arts, it was owned by a crackpot who claimed he'd use it for arts. Big difference.
 
Gameguy326 said:
I am legitimately disappointed with this. That space was intended for arts in what is an arts desert. I'm all for the lab tower, but the first three floors of that building should have been dedicated to arts. That would have been a huge contribution to the community. This is yet another lab building in a sea of lab buildings; a drop in the ocean.
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The performing arts center was always a land banking scam. It was never going to happen.
 
Equilibria said:
That space was not intended for arts, it was owned by a crackpot who claimed he'd use it for arts. Big difference.
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It was (is) literally zoned for arts. Constellation Center aside, that's what the land was used for.

This thing's "auditorium" holds...what was it, a maximum of 300 people? Great. I think people don't realize just how small the arts component of this actually is.
 
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