Volpe Transportation Center Development | Kendall Sq | Cambridge

[CSTH]

Maybe so. But the fall-back business case is that hot- desking and frequent reconfiguration make it possible to keep <1 desk per worker ... And that business case still works even if we all hate working in public all the time...

 

[fattony]

If one goes to the city's assessing map, extending the Broad Canal to the Volpe site would represent a taking of One Broadway, which is assessed for $93 million. So beyond the cost of construction (and who is to pay for that?), who is to pay for One Broadway?

Why would a canal extension disturb One Broadway? It'll eat that bit of parking and Broad Canal Way, but not the whole building. Grant it isn't trivial, but I'm sure there is some size and shape for the canal that fits the available space without imploding the building.

 

[lapradetom]

In relation to the Cambridge market, If you stand back and look at the big picture, I would think that the best argument for going tall would be the lack of enough space in this particular market for the burgeoning biotech market. It seems every bio-related company in the world wants in on the Cambridge pool of talent. No matter what, the market could support tall with whatever they put in it. Mixed use may work best....hotel, then office, then housing, then a restaurant at the top. Imagine what the views would be like up there. Why don't they do an RFP like Boston did with 111 Federal St? Even though I'm disappointed with those proposals, it get's people thinking about "highest and best use" of property. Not saying "highest" needs to be taken literally here, but it wouldn't hurt either.

 

[stellarfun]

Why would a canal extension disturb One Broadway? It'll eat that bit of parking and Broad Canal Way, but not the whole building. Grant it isn't trivial, but I'm sure there is some size and shape for the canal that fits the available space without imploding the building.

It doesn't take the whole building, a straight-line extension would just take a slice. And if you take Broad Canal Way, doing that likely has implications with respect to emergency access/egress to/from the building.

And if one looks at this map,

http://www.cambridgehistory.org/discover/industry/industrymap.html

one sees a Cambridge Gas Light Plant located quite near to where the extended canal would go.

Before the electric bulb, illumination was provided by illuminating gas. Illuminating gas was manufactured from coal; byproducts of the manufacturing process are exceedingly nasty and long-lasting pollutants. I am 95+ percent certain the excavation for a canal extension would be a prohibitively costly one, because of the coal tar, phenol, etc. contamination in this area, given the former site of the illuminating gas plant.

That's what makes the City Of Cambridge Planning Debt. anxious.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

 

[bigpicture7]

In relation to the Cambridge market, If you stand back and look at the big picture, I would think that the best argument for going tall would be the lack of enough space in this particular market for the burgeoning biotech market. It seems every bio-related company in the world wants in on the Cambridge pool of talent. No matter what, the market could support tall with whatever they put in it. Mixed use may work best....hotel, then office, then housing, then a restaurant at the top. Imagine what the views would be like up there...

I agree that if there's any place that's begging for density, it's the kendall area. The science journal Nature ran a piece last year on the extreme high desire to be in kendall (and commensurate skyrocketing real estate costs).

The only issue with your statement is that biotechs often can't practically be in skyscrapers. They require a ridiculous array of mechanical systems to deal with the wet lab space within. If you look at most of the new rooftops in kendall, you'll notice dozens of towering vent chimneys and 2-3 story mechanical penthouses. Very difficult to integrate that stuff into a skyscraper. That said, many of these firms need non-lab office space too, and there is a massive housing shortage for the biotech workers, as well as a hotel shortage...so Kendall may still support tall...just not for the biotechs alone.

 

[whighlander]

dshoost, (its about five slides)

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2515497-hr-amp-a-economic-analysis-17-nov-2015.html
__________________________

The RFQ contained the following provisions as to what type of replacement building GSA was seeking:



_________________
The RFP (not released to the public) contains:



The city's Planning Board and economic consultant voiced concern about what might be revealed by the Environmental Site Assessment. I think its fair to say that GSA will seek to limit its responsibility for cleaning up the site, as would otherwise be required by the 1980 CERCLA (Superfund) law.

Possible ways for minimizing cleanup cost would include putting the new Volpe building on the most contaminated portion of the site, as government retains title to the land. For the non-government portion of the site, maximize the placing of open space where there are other highly contaminated areas, and if one has to excavate, dig where contamination is less. If environmental remediation costs are high, that may dictate either more gsf of building being allowed, and/or a shift to more space being allocated for 'high-rent' uses, i.e., labs.

Stellar -- Thanks for the links -- the most important aspects of the RFI concerned the needs of the facility as I previously posted:

 Office operations including conference rooms and space for collaborative, joint-use activities,
and special use space (i.e., fitness center, child care facility) (approximately 90%);
 Flexible, ground-level laboratory space to accommodate simulators and large vehicles and
storage space (approximately 10%); and
 Public access to showcase the work of the Volpe Center.

The labs and Public showcase all require a lot of footprint as would probably the storage, and fitness center and child care facility

As a result I would expect that the RFP specifies an essentially similar segmentation of functions as is presently the case.:

• A tower with office and some labs [high security possibly in a deep basement]
  
• one large footprint low rise consolidating the rest of the functions and attached with some kind of corridor to separate it from the office tower for security and safety reasons
  
• some sort of accommodation for parking for up to 1300 employees

As far as contamination is concerned -- I doubt that the Volpe or NASA in its short tenure did much contaminating. So then you have to ask is there any reason the Volpe site is any more contaminated than the general Kendall Sq. land that has been redeveloped into office, labs, parking and residences??

Finally as to your renders for the west coast "star wars / trek fantasy campuses" -- they are going to find one immutable fact of nature -- it might look as though having everything on one really big floor is a huge collaborative advantage over multiple floors -- but it really is just a matter of limiting of distance / time. The Pentagon has some of the biggest single floors anywhere and it has the same kinds of problems that a towers have with respect to person-person connectivity.

The only time you really need everything on one floor is when your are building A-380's or Aircraft Carriers, Searching for Gravitational Waves with LIGO, or accelerating protons in the Large Hadron Collider

 

[whighlander]

In relation to the Cambridge market, If you stand back and look at the big picture, I would think that the best argument for going tall would be the lack of enough space in this particular market for the burgeoning biotech market. It seems every bio-related company in the world wants in on the Cambridge pool of talent. No matter what, the market could support tall with whatever they put in it. Mixed use may work best....hotel, then office, then housing, then a restaurant at the top. Imagine what the views would be like up there. Why don't they do an RFP like Boston did with 111 Federal St? Even though I'm disappointed with those proposals, it get's people thinking about "highest and best use" of property. Not saying "highest" needs to be taken literally here, but it wouldn't hurt either.

Lapradetom -- the Bio Labs have typically been low large footprint buildings for a number of reasons including the need to run a lot of air through their ventilation systems and exhaust it high up and away from the intakes

However, we are seeing lab-centric buildings [with bio-company offices] getting taller such as several under construction on Binney Street toward's First St.

My guess is that just because of "the skunk in the neighborhood effect" stigma attached to "labs" means that you would have trouble marketing the space above bio labs to residences, hotels or restraurants

 

[tangent]

Flex space with first come first serve seating seems all around the best solution for office space. Let workers decide when they want an office with a view, an open floor plan, a conference room, collaboration space, dark secluded quiet office with no windows to distract or work from home. People will usually pick the best space for themselves and for the work they are doing.

Managers waste far too much time, in my experience, trying to figure out the optimal cube farm or whatever layout they think will work for everyone all the time and end up with sub optimal arrangements that are only good for some of the workers some of the time.

Lab space is different in that there are usually large fixed equipment that need to be optimally located depending on their electrical, gas, water line connection, waste water, venting needs and their physical dimensions.

Having sufficiently sized freight elevators and all sorts of service connections up to a higher floor almost certainly adds too much cost to make lab space go vertical with a small floor plate.

 

[stellarfun]

Kendall Square 1947

The canal extends beyond Ames St., how much further beyond? The circular objects look to be illuminating gas tanks.

History of gas street lighting in Boston:

1882
First electric lights installed in Boston’s Scolly [sic] Square.

1890
Oil lamps converted to naphtha gas, a derivative of gasoline.

1899
Open flame gas lamps converted to mantle. Mantle provides 4 times the wattage of open flame. (Manufactured gas is used in all lamps until natural gas is introduced by the Boston Gas Company in 1960.)

1909
First tungsten electric lamps installed. Some are still in use in the North End today.

1912
Naphtha lamps replaced by tungsten electric lamps throughout the entire city due to the rising cost of naphtha. Those that have to remain due to lack of electrical facilities are converted to manufactured gas lights.

1913
Last of the gas lamps in city proper converted to electric.

http://www.cityofboston.gov/publicworks/lighting/history.asp

I assume Cambridge is very similar, thus the illuminating gas facilities shown in the photo are what remained approximately 30 years after the end of illuminating gas.
__________________

As to why NASA wasn't concerned about contamination, the ERC was built before any of the landmark Federal environmental laws were enacted. CERCLA became law in 1980.

I know of an instance where EPA and the Federal Highway Administration recently spent about $1,000 a sq ft to clean about 100 sq ft of streambed contaminated from the operation of an illuminating gas plant a century ago. Contamination was discovered from test borings for a replacement bridge.

GE discharged PCBs into the Hudson for 30 years ending in 1977

FORT EDWARD, N.Y.—After seven years, the removal of 310,000 pounds of pollutants and at least $1.6 billion in costs, General Electric Co. is about to permanently shut down its dredging operation on the Hudson River, a final step in GE’s toughest-ever cleanup job.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-nears-end-of-hudson-river-cleanup-1447290049

By my math, GE's cost was over $5,000 a pound.
____________________

Canal being filled in. West of 3rd St.

The start of construction for NASA's ERC.

____________________

At its greatest extent, the Broad Canal reached Portland St.

 

[Mongo]

So I've been playing around with this massing idea in my head for a few days. It's really rough but I think it balances flat and open lab space with towers and public open space.

0-2nd floor:

The purple would be retail that would surround a new park space in the middle. The smaller purple squares are kinda of "restaurant in the plaza" sort of venues meant to bring some life to the area. The retail on the outside would be mixed with residential and office lobbies (which we will get to in a second) with the green being a hotel lobby.
Orange is the new Volpe center.

3-7:

The different podiums are connected by high archways that allow for open passage to the park on the other side. The blue is all open plan lab space, allowing companies to occupy one or half a floor for all personnel. Think taking a quarter of the Apple UFO and sticking it on this site. But elevated two stories so people can pass through the archways underneath it and freely access the park on the other side from Broadway.

Floor 7 +:

Here you start getting the true height. Purple is residential with the lower right one being your "as tall as possible iconic tower." Green is hotel, red is semi-tall open plan office towers. The HVAC infrastructure for the labs below would be clustered on the roof of the area between the towers to maximize usable square footage.

This has another benefit wherein the elevators for each use don't have to all be in one core. The office and lab elevators will be in the office tower lobbies. The residential elevator core will pass through the lab space and thus be smaller and not have to serve that separate functional area of the building, same with the hotel.

Feel free to criticize/critique ect. I just thought this was a good way to blend wide office/lab spaces with residential uses.

 

[DigitalSciGuy]

Think taking a quarter of the Apple UFO and sticking it on this site. But elevated two stories so people can pass through the archways underneath it and freely access the park on the other side from Broadway.

And making that quarter of Apple UFO tastefully urban and less greenwashing, sprawling, insular, suburban tech campus...

Bravo - I like the outdoor room an L-shaped building like this would form with the Third Square Apartments. I'd love to see the new Volpe Center you propose to actually form a street wall along Binney and Monroe Sts, perhaps widening the base to include the retail/restaurant you have standing alone along Binney St. Maybe something like this:

0-2:


3-7:

 

[stellarfun]

The Federal government wants four acres for Volpe, so no squeezing it off onto a corner of the site.

 

[shawn]

I'm not sure the open floor plan trend will last forever. The huge productivity leaps we were supposed to see are not materializing; a lot of workers do their best creative work with a bit of privacy/quiet time...interspersed with collaborative teamwork.

I can attest to that. We're removing open-office arrangements in favor of more creatively-aligned cubicles. Open space is actually quite counterproductive for about 1/2 the personality types out there.

 

[Mongo]

The Federal government wants four acres for Volpe, so no squeezing it off onto a corner of the site.

Where does four acres come from? The RFI only states that they want 390,000 GSF, which would fit in about 13 floors for the outline I had and 8 for the outline DigitialSciGuy had.

 

[HalcyonEra]

I can attest to that. We're removing open-office arrangements in favor of more creatively-aligned cubicles. Open space is actually quite counterproductive for about 1/2 the personality types out there.

It's most certainly an ill-conceived concept that companies are finally realizing. My company recently expanded / renovated and the architects were extremely aggressive in pushing the open concept seating / interior office plans which was met with utter disdain from the executive team. It was rejected and thus far, everyone seems happy about it.

 

[stellarfun]

Where does four acres come from? The RFI only states that they want 390,000 GSF, which would fit in about 13 floors for the outline I had and 8 for the outline DigitialSciGuy had.

Four acres has been discussed for some time, in the context of how much acreage would be available to develop, and how much of the developable acres would be set aside for open space.

....
* the creation of a minimum of 2.5 acres of open space.
...
Cheung said that, as part of a potential redevelopment deal, the federal government has discussed exchanging development rights on 10 acres of its existing 14-acre site for a 4-acre site with a new government building. The zoning for the Volpe Center site will define what’s allowed to be built, and in what nature and style, on the land that the federal government exchanges for a new building, he said.

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/r...ndall-square-soon-be-home-to-the-tallest.html

 

[BKNA]

I dont know about the acreage the feds are requiring, but there are security offsets from any vehicle space (road, parking, drop off, anything accessible by a car) to the federal building. I believe its 150'.
Unfortunately, the federal building cant fit between Binney and Munroe with those requirements.

EDIT:
Its 75' not 150'

 

[Mongo]

I dont know about the acreage the feds are requiring, but there are security offsets from any vehicle space (road, parking, drop off, anything accessible by a car) to the federal building. I believe its 150'.
Unfortunately, the federal building cant fit between Binney and Munroe with those requirements.

That is a really stupid requirement to impose on a transportation research building in the middle of a city. And the current building doesn't meet that at all.

 

[stellarfun]

Here is a link to the Environmental Assessment Phase 1 documents.

http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/197447

I only glanced at a few. The Sanborn map from 1900 indicates a business associated with illuminating gas at the NW corner of the site. There is a link to a Haley & Aldrich report on 225 Binney, where a plume of hazardous contamination was apparently discovered, and a concern whether the plume was migrating under the Volpe site.

On quick glance, most of the test borings were done in/near the playground. Utility contractors would dig post holes and discover coal tar beneath the surface. Quite disconcerting.

 

[fattony]

First, I don't think anyone wants a floor plate as big as you've drawn in blue. That's the size of a shopping mall or an automobile factory. Why on earth would anyone want that much contiguous floor space in Kendall Square?

Second, I'm not sure that tower-on-lab massing works. There are 30+ foot mechanicals and vents on top of many lab buildings. Those are going to be where? Rising up alongside multiple stories of apartment windows?