South End BCA Plaza Re-Do

statler

statler

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I saw the headline on this and got excited. I was hoping it was referring to Gov't Center. Oh well.

The Globe said:
Designers vie to take a plaza beyond bricks
5 finalists picked for project at Boston Center for the Arts

By Thomas C. Palmer Jr., Globe Staff | June 6, 2006

One of the busiest public spaces in the South End, the broad brick plaza outside the Boston Center for the Arts, could soon be transformed into an arty outdoor showcase featuring shifting decks, benches that light up, and images beamed onto panels installed on the plaza.

Five design teams were chosen yesterday by center officials as finalists in a competition to redesign the Tremont Street plaza and other spaces around the complex between Berkeley and Clarendon streets.

Among the proposals is one from four architecture students at Harvard University, who suggested a ``ribbon of translucent screens" that would project images; and one from another architecture student in which the plaza itself would have shifting decks that could be elevated for special events.

``The BCA will create a distinctive . . . gathering place, while inviting the public `in' to explore what this hip and historic arts complex has to offer," the center's president, Libbie Shufro, said in a statement yesterday.

The plaza redesign is but the latest in a series of projects at the site. They include new theaters and new headquarters for the Boston Ballet, along with renovated facilities. The upscale Atelier | 505 condominium and retail building was built next door, and the center plans to open a jazz club this fall.

The 4-acre Boston Center for the Arts complex hosts the historic Cyclorama, a 23,000-square-foot rotunda that is used for exhibitions and other public events, the new Calderwood Pavilion theater, the Mills Gallery of contemporary art, plus artists' studios and related workspace.

The property, in a part of the South End packed with restaurants, is also at a pedestrian crossroads.

The plaza redesign competition, called ``inside::eek:ut -- Weaving Arts Into the Urban Fabric," involves the several thousand square feet in front of and around the main buildings on Tremont Street.

The five finalists, selected from 66 entrants, include design teams from Falmouth, Cambridge, Providence, and St. Louis. The winner will be selected this summer and announced in September.

Even though more than half of the submissions were from professional designers, the finalists include a contingent of student designers.

The five proposals:

``PanOptical Camouflage," by a team of four master's of architecture students at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, is the series of translucent screens that would entertain passersby with images like ones sometimes shown inside the Cyclorama.

``Weaving Art Into the Urban Fabric," by Stephen Stimson Associates, Landscape Architects of Falmouth, includes a plaza of ``shifting and interlocking planes" that would be made from three types of paving -- both historic and contemporary materials.

``Softscape," by patterhn design of St. Louis, a collaboration of two former students of Washington University's Graduate School of Architecture, would use a main plaza floor made of wood.

``The new floor elevates everyday events into the realm of performance," the artists said in a prepared statement.

``the inBetween" is the work of Rachel Broek, a former Iowa resident living in Providence, where she studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. Broek proposed seating on the edge of the plaza, lighting emanating from the plaza structures themselves, and ``shading from a tensile fabric structure above."

``A Daydream" was submitted by Daniel Cho, who studied civil engineering at Kyunghee University in South Korea, served in the US Army, and now is in the architecture program at Rhode Island School of Design. His is the one that incorporates a plaza with lifted or lowered deck floors.

``I think we got a very interesting range of ideas," said David Hacin, president of the architectural firm Hacin + Associates Inc. of Boston and chairman of the 35-year-old nonprofit Boston Center for the Arts. ``It provokes an interesting discussion about the nature of public open space in Boston and what it could be or should be."

Hacin said a jury of six chose the finalists, based on the quality and creativity of their work. With a construction budget of $2 million to $3 million, Hacin said, judges were also mindful of proposals that were affordable.

The jury included Ann McQueen, program officer of The Boston Foundation, Peter Reed, senior deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Barry Gaither, director and curator of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston.

Later this month, the center will display the work of all of the finalists, runners-up, and others, in the Cyclorama.

On June 24, the public will hear presentations and be able to comment on the proposals.

An exhibition of the proposals is available beginning today at http://insideout.bcaonline.org.

Thomas C. Palmer Jr. can be reached at tpalmer@globe.com.
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The "shifting decks" and "ribbon of translucent screens" sound like a little much to me. I find the plaza to be very enjoyable as it is. Aren't there more important things in the South End they could be worrying about?
 
It's an arts center, so naturally they want to make their own outdoor property more artistic.
 
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The Globe said:
Two plazas, with different views
Porter Square's is uninviting; BCA's plans show promise

By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent | June 20, 2006

A well-designed public plaza is an invitation to socialize, a civic nexus where people come together to relax, enjoy the city, and feel pride of ownership in their neighborhood.

Right now it's possible to judge how well such public spaces work -- or might work -- thanks to the opening of a new plaza in Cambridge and the display of designs for another on view at the Boston Center for the Arts.

The new Shapiro Family Plaza , which runs along the Massachusetts Avenue side of the Porter Square Shopping Center , fails on all counts. Its blaring black-and-white striped motif is more than uninviting; it's repellent. Folks looking for a place to sit for a spell on a nice day will likely flee into Dunkin' Donuts rather than linger on the plaza.

Porter Square bustles, and its people need a place to come to rest. The city of Cambridge has been working to streamline traffic and make the area more hospitable. The square is -- minimally -- easier to navigate on foot than it used to be.

Earlier this month, the city unveiled the plaza, designed by artist Toshihiro Katayama with help from landscape designer Cynthia Smith .

Katayama, who was a professor at Harvard University for decades and was the director of its Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, has plenty of experience with large-scale public design, especially in Japan. He has a taste for bold geometries; MBTA riders will know the star mural he designed for the State Street station. The stainless steel ``T" outside the Alewife station is also his handiwork.

Porter Square is a visual and aural cacophony in need of quiet space. The heavy traffic, the competing styles of architecture and art -- from Victorian brownstones to the banal shopping plaza to the modernist T station (and Susumu Shingu's airy kinetic sculpture) -- called for a serene axis around which all the activity might spin. Instead, Katayama has extended a pattern that spans all the nearby streets. He's built a giant, forbidding crosswalk.

As in a crosswalk, you won't want to stop. Jagged granite boulders crop up gloomily (don't try to sit on one; you might hurt yourself). Katayama added the boulders as a nod to New England's landscape. The same goes for two stone walls, which have little regional authenticity because, probably for practical reasons, they're not dry stone walls.

The walls and the boulders are jarringly naturalistic set against the pavement's Modernist geometry. Black-and-white steel banners that match the pavers rise from the ground; what's merely aggressive underfoot turns downright confrontational when it asserts itself into the visitor s' space.

Perhaps it was a mistake for Cambridge to designate the plaza as a public art project rather than a landscape design project. Either way, it went through a process that included vetting and approval by neighbors and a jury. What were they thinking? High -- not to mention lousy -- concept has trumped comfort.

The Boston Center for the Arts must walk that line between art-friendly and pedestrian-friendly design for its proposed new plaza. The design competition is near its end: jurors have chosen five plans out of 66 submitted. All are on view in the Cyclorama through Sunday. On Saturday, anyone interested can attend a community review to discuss the designs. The winner will be announced in September. (In the interests of full disclosure, for a few months in 1988I worked for a nonprofit that BCA President Libbie Shufro ran.)

The BCA project is larger and more ambitious than the Porter Square fiasco. This plaza encompasses the entire block from Berkeley Street to Clarendon Street. The aim is to make the block into a unified campus, easily navigable, in a way that integrates the historic architecture of the neighborhood and introduces the arts center's programs to the public.

My favorite is Daniel Cho's plan, a place for the community to gather. He proposes that the large area of the plaza in front of the BCA be both park and performance space: a sunken, inviting area with a reflecting pool can be covered over with a deck to create a stage. Add to that a jazz cafe and balcony off of Hamersley's and -- at least in the warmer months -- the joint is jumping.

Two designs -- one by Aaron Dorf , Kirsten Hively , Rebecca Hutchinson and Adam Modesitt from the Harvard Graduate School of Design; one by Stephen Stimson Associates, Landscape Architects, Inc. -- suggest large-scale video projection on the plaza of whatever's going on inside the BCA. Outdoor video is unquestionably the wave of the future, as arts organizations strive to make their walls metaphorically transparent.

In both cases, the ideas are too big and not thought through. Do we really want to turn Tremont Street into a drive-in, with video projected on the facade of the BCA, as the Harvard group proposes? The steel mesh projection pavilion Stimson has thought up makes more sense. Ultimately, though, art exhibitions and theatrical productions rarely make good video; it would add up to white noise on the plaza.

The simplicity of the other two proposals would pull the sprawling plaza together. Eric R. Hoffman and Tony A. Patterson of patterhn integrate the plaza with a wood floor that would be easy on the legs and help you find your way. Rachel Broek proposes a transparent canopy. Like patterhn's idea, it would unify the architecturally diverse elements of the block, but I'm guessing it would be a hassle to maintain, given the local pigeon population.

Any one of them beats turning the BCA Plaza into an oversize crosswalk.
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I dont belive it, they took a bad plaza and made it worse. No wait, I do belive it.
 
I ride by that plaza everyday after work and I never see anybody use it. Why does it have to be such a monumental effort in design? The plaza in Davis Square is simple. A space paved with brick, light tree cover (honey locust) and plenty of benches and small tables. There are always plenty of people hanging out in the Davis plaza.

Think long, think wrong.
 
The Davis Square plaza has a sense of enclosure that the Porter one lacks. On one side is a commercial building with JP Licks, Store 24, and an Italian restaurant. Across College Avenue is one of the two T station buildings. Across Holland Street is the other T entrance, and the Somerville Theatre-Hobbs Building. Both streets are small and fairly easy to cross.

But also remember that this is the second design for the Davis Square plaza. The first one had an arched glass skylight about 7 feet high, and many more statues. After a few years, the Davis Square Task Force successfully lobbied the MBTA and the city to reduce the skylight to the small platform you see today. At the same time, some of the statues were moved out of the plaza, across the street into Seven Hills Park. I think some of the street furniture was changed, too.

So maybe, like Davis (and Copley), Porter Square will get it right the second time around.
 
What they should do is tear down that ugly headhouse and build a 5 storie building with retail facing the plaza, maybe even a walkway connecting it to Somerville Ave.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
What they should do is tear down that ugly headhouse and build a 5 storie building with retail facing the plaza, maybe even a walkway connecting it to Somerville Ave.
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Yes!

The new Porter plaza isn't so bad on these warm nights when the ice cream shop puts tables out.
 
Hell, to add on that, build a park over the train tracks. Lord knows this area is in need of some green space.
 
Lesley University plans to build over the train tracks. Whether their plans include any green space, I don't know.
 
The worst thing about the new Porter Square Plaza is not that it looks hideous now, though it does, but rather that it will look even worse with time and wear. Whoever thought white pavers were a good idea needs their head examined. It was also specifically designed to have no comfortable surfaces to sit or relax because, you know, those homeless people, they linger. The amount of planning, committee meetings and community input that went into making this dreck raises it from being merely annoying to outright hilarious.
 
One major problem with the Porter Square plaza is that it is adjacent to a strip mall and parking lot.
 
^ You hit the nail on the head. The reason for the traffic jams and the general wasteland feel of porter is the strip mall. While it provides important retail outlets to the community, the design could have been a lot better. What a waste of land.
 
Most of it was built in the 1950s. The redesign a few years ago improved it by adding the CVS building, better pedestrian paths, and lots of bicycle racks. It's still far from ideal, but at least it's better than it was.
 
ZenZen said:
The reason for the traffic jams and the general wasteland feel of porter is the strip mall. While it provides important retail outlets to the community, the design could have been a lot better. What a waste of land.
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The solution is...structure parking. Four or five stories on top of the present lot, with the whole ground floor as retail opening onto the streets.

Then I wouldn't mind if they built a thirty story apartment tower on top. The views to Boston would be fabulous, and maybe they'd be tempted to electrify the commuter line and run frequent trains from Porter to North Station.
 
Re: South End plaza re-do

Damn this thread's been dead for two years...

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Re: South End plaza re-do

That looks like it will be just another plaza that will go unused 90% of the year. What is to attract people besides events at the BCA? It doesn't look like there will be any reason to walk through this plaza other than that it is in the middle of the intersection. The South End deserves better but it's not like public places is a thing that the "New Boston" can do well. (Yes, I am linking this new plaza to Government Center.)
 
Re: South End plaza re-do

Is this a new plaza? I thought it was a redesign of a plaza that has always been there (even before the BCA existed as an institution).

This isn't a huge space.
 
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