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World beckons Hub architects
As design business slows at home, Boston firms create masterpieces elsewhere
By Scott Van Voorhis, Globe Correspondent | October 18, 2008
With business slowing at home, Boston-area architects are jetting across the world to land monumental projects that even master builder Robert Moses might envy.
The Boston office of Cannon Design is designing a $1 billion medical center for the Saudi royal family. In Dubai, Boston firm Burt Hill cooked up an unusual horizontal "skyscraper." And in Beijing, Steffian Bradley is undertaking a 4-million-square-foot condominium complex that features 10 towers.
While Boston-area architectural firms have long enjoyed an international reputation for their overseas work, many are now winning competitions for the kind of signature projects that confer worldwide recognition. Many of the biggest are in emerging economies, where cash-rich countries such as Dubai and China continue to spend lavishly on undertakings of breathtaking size and ambition, even as a deepening credit crunch cuts off money for new projects in the United States.
A recent survey by DiCicco, Gulman & Co. found that more than 56 percent of the top local architectural firms are now doing business overseas.
"The reality is American architects are in great demand, Boston architects particularly," said Richard Fitzgerald, executive director of the Boston Society of Architects.
Moreover, local architects say their Hub ties are a decided advantage in competing for these projects because so many foreign decision makers spent time at one of Boston's colleges and universities.
And working in places such as Dubai and China also provides them with once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to undertake landmark projects that might never get off the drawing boards at home. Gone are constraints of long negotiations with local community leaders and the challenges of lining up complicated financing packages.
"A million square feet is pretty much what you start with," said Don Deng, head of the China office for Boston design firm Steffian Bradley Architects. "Building big and fast, that is the whole notion." For example, at 1.8 million square feet, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Saudi Arabia is as big as any major US medical center. The cutting-edge facility will have an all-electronic record-keeping system and a private wing for treatment of the royal family.
Cannon Design specializes in hospitals and medical institutions, but the royal contract was a particular coup for the firm's Boston office. The firm has just one year to complete its design plans before construction begins. As many as 100 planners and designers will work on the project.
"The speed at which they are expecting this to be delivered, by most North American standards, is breathtaking," said Mark Mendell, president of Cannon's international practice, who is based in the firm's Boston office. "A billion dollars worth of design work in 12 months - that is very impatient."
In Dubai, meanwhile, Burt Hill is making its mark with a skyscraper that rests on its side along the ground, instead of soaring into the sky. It is a quarter of a mile long, and features LED signage and advertising along its side. It is part of a larger, 2-mile-long development, appropriately named "Limitless."
"The money is flowing," said Steve Brittan, a principal at Burt Hill. "There never seems to be a shortage of financing for any of those projects."
Meantime, echoes of Boston can be found in Beijing, where Steffian Bradley is working on an enormous residential complex, using for inspiration the River Court project in Cambridge it designed several years ago, according to Deng.
The overnight success of these firms was years in the making, years of quiet, behind-the-scenes efforts. Before it won the King Faisal contract, Cannon was tested by Saudi officials on a much smaller project. In Pakistan, Boston architect Thomas Payette spent decades working on projects for local billionaire and philanthropist Aga Khan. Those efforts have landed a plum assignment for Payette: overseeing the construction of a $450 million liberal arts college.
The new Aga Khan University of Arts and Sciences will establish one of the first full-scale liberal arts colleges in the Middle East. The school, which is designed in Islamic city form, will eventually be home to 10,000 students.
"Architects go where the work is," Payette said.
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Why don't we get these designs? Even Boston architects knows Boston is not the right environment to design and build skyscrapers.
