Volpe Transportation Center Development | Kendall Sq | Cambridge

The spying issue would seem a bit overblown, but I excluded hotel uses from my suggestion for that reason. And if you have an air gap between the low rise street front building and simply make it a windowless alley between the buildings on the low rise retail sides then it isn't really a legit concern for cameras, lasers or microwave... I supposed there is a legit Wifi hacking concern if the gap isn't big enough but that does seem to be about it.
 
fattony said:
I wish it were at least just greenery instead of a parking lot, but wishing for retail is too much.
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Agreed on that point. I don't think it should be wishing for too much, but it probably is. Keeping the parking on the service alley side and getting just greenery on Binney doesn't seem like wishing for too much since it affects mostly just landscaping. Or even just cutting the parking court in half.
 
tangent said:
The spying issue would seem a bit overblown, but I excluded hotel uses from my suggestion for that reason. And if you have an air gap between the low rise street front building and simply make it a windowless alley between the buildings on the low rise retail sides then it isn't really a legit concern for cameras, lasers or microwave... I supposed there is a legit Wifi hacking concern if the gap isn't big enough but that does seem to be about it.
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Are you familiar with Tempest?

Are you familiar with Faraday cages?

5282f094e8e44e8e72000072-trafag-e2a-photo


^^^Click on image icon to open in a new tab. The metal mesh facade of this building is a Faraday cage.
 
You guys are going way over the top here. The government has no technological problems safeguarding secure information. People are the leaky point. Nobody is sniffing anything off a WiFi network that shouldn't be out there. There is classified work going on all over Boston, Cambridge, and in every other major city in buildings of all sizes and shapes.

And no, the metal facade of a building is not a Faraday cage for WiFi, cellular, or any other common communication bands.
 
I don’t think the facade is part of a cage. Don’t dismiss the idea that there are one or more in a secure structure. Plus the checklist of “specialized” glass, hanger like multi story ground floor with utilities “carefully isolated” and built into hanger ceiling for “dampening”. “Occupied floors above” with priority of security as you rise. Entrance is cut out of hanger area, on ground floor of public face, armored, easily isolated. Roof is rubberized compound sandwich.
These are hypothetical starters if you are going for that sort of thing...
I agree that humans and hacking are big holes!
 
tobyjug said:
I don’t think the facade is part of a cage. Don’t dismiss the idea that there are one or more in a secure structure. Plus the checklist of “specialized” glass, hanger like multi story ground floor with utilities “carefully isolated” and built into hanger ceiling for “dampening”. “Occupied floors above” with priority of security as you rise. Entrance is cut out of hanger area, on ground floor of public face, armored, easily isolated. Roof is rubberized compound sandwich.
These are hypothetical starters if you are going for that sort of thing...
I agree that humans and hacking are big holes!
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I concur Volpe is not a 'true' cage but it sure looks to me that they are trying to attenuate EM leakage. The windows look to be recessed, the facade face material looks to be cut on the oblique so there is no full frontal 'peeking'.

And the government is indeed paranoid, because it knows the tricks it uses to eavesdrop. OBL basically cut himself off electronically from the world outside because he was so concerned about US capabilities.
 
Yes, I am familiar with at least some of the requirements, some more than others.

Standoff perimeter is really the issue. 50 feet

If an alley behind a row of low rises was behind the security perimeter then you could accomplish the same. So 50 feet between buildings. Looks like they have over 100 feet of setback from the sidewalk, but it is a bit hard to tell from the renders. So to my mind with the existing layout you could have a 50 ft deep building along the street and make it serviceable with a loading dock or something to one side. and still maintain the 50 foot separation to new Volpe. That is pretty narrow, but seems like it could still be worth it because there is a lot of frontage there. And the land is valuable enough there to make it worth considering a small building or two beyond just the aesthetics of the street.

I don't think they are going to be looking for a major redesign at this point, so I agree that maybe better landscaping and less parking along Binney is at most what you could hope to push back on.... so the discussion is more academic.
 
There are whole building SCIFs that are far more attractive than this. Placing the blame for its looks on eavesdropping and spying is very incorrect.
 
Are those windows in "the grooves" or are they a translucent panels like the thin marble on the Beinecke Library at Yale? I don't understand how to read their "fog" color.

MIT-Volpe-01_0.jpg
 
Equilibria said:
Technically not newer than the renders we were discussing, but buried in MIT's 2019 Town-Gown presentation were massing models for the whole site - see slide 26:

http://cambridgema.iqm2.com/Citizen...etingID=2371&MediaPosition=&ID=1197&CssClass=
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1BxBWRch.jpg


I wonder if MITIMCo will lease out the existing Volpe building once they take control of the site. Of the eight buildings in this massing (including the new Volpe) it looks like only two (?) overlap with the existing tower's footprint. Seems like they could pretty easily build out the rest of the site first, saving the existing building's footprint for last. The (non-Volpe) building along Binney, for example, would basically be a stand-alone project.

The existing Volpe building is 375k sf; at $40/ft (which is cheap for Kendall) that's $15 MM/year. Rent the place out to, say, startups/incubators/co-working space for five years while the builders are running through the other phases of this project, and that's $75 MM to be collected in rent.
 
JumboBuc said:
1BxBWRch.jpg


I wonder if MITIMCo will lease out the existing Volpe building once they take control of the site. Of the eight buildings in this massing (including the new Volpe) it looks like only two (?) overlap with the existing tower's footprint. Seems like they could pretty easily build out the rest of the site first, saving the existing building's footprint for last. The (non-Volpe) building along Binney, for example, would basically be a stand-alone project.

The existing Volpe building is 375k sf; at $40/ft (which is cheap for Kendall) that's $15 MM/year. Rent the place out to, say, startups/incubators/co-working space for five years while the builders are running through the other phases of this project, and that's $75 MM to be collected in rent.
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it could work, but you'd also probably be looking at least $50-75/ft in tenant improvement costs.
 
stellarfun said:
The referenced slides were produced by the city, for presentation purposes.
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Are you sure about that? Why would the city produce massing models where the only detailed buildings are the ones being built by MITIMCo (the SoMa buildings are also detailed in the model).
 
Equilibria said:
Are you sure about that? Why would the city produce massing models where the only detailed buildings are the ones being built by MITIMCo (the SoMa buildings are also detailed in the model).
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I posted in error. The person identified with the slides on Kendall & Volpe is Steve Marsh, Managing Director MITMCO.
 
stellarfun said:
I posted in error. The person identified with the slides on Kendall & Volpe is Steve Marsh, Managing Director MITMCO.
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I WISH the city produced massing models for Kendall with the buildings from various developers in detail, don't get me wrong...
 
All the perimeter trees on the new site for the relocated Volpe building, maybe a dozen mature, have been cut down (no effort to save them apparently). Construction to start soon?
 
Brad Plaid said:
All the perimeter trees on the new site for the relocated Volpe building, maybe a dozen mature, have been cut down (no effort to save them apparently). Construction to start soon?
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Nothing on the weekly updates on the MIT Construction Mitigation site.
https://web.mit.edu/facilities/construction/updates.shtml

However, the MIT Volpe site gives the address as 55 Broadway, and the construction manager is John Moriarty. Maybe remediation before excavation?
 
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