All Topics
Great Marsh Resiliency Planning
The North Shore’s Great Marsh Coalition kicked-off its Living Shoreline Project by hosting the first in a six part workshop series at the Salisbury Public Library last Friday. Through an interactive community workshop, the Coalition and several partnering organizations built upon the Great Marsh Symposium which took place earlier in the month. As a guest speaker, I worked with residents…
450 Kendall Achieves LEED Gold
450 Kendall Street has achieved LEED Gold, making all six of the buildings in BioMed Realty’s Kendall Square LEED certified. Kendall Square was a pioneer: this development received a special permit as a Planned Unit Developent (PUD) in 1999, before LEED certification was a requirement of special permits. There is only one parcel remaining to be developed, and that lot…
Successful Public Spaces Are All About Edges
In the past few days I have attended three presentations about designing successful public spaces, two at ABX and one sponsored by Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance. I learned a new word, thigmotactic. A strict definition is something like contact-loving, but in the context of placemaking it is generally used to mean edge-seeking. When selecting a place to stop and rest,…
Arrowstreet Bake-Off!
We held Arrowstreet’s first bake-off this week, and the results were delicious! We are a competitive group, and there were thirteen entries in the “no-rules” contest, from truffles, madeleines, and macarons, to ice cream, cakes, and tarts. The whole office was eager to try everything and we gathered in the kitchen after lunch for the tasting. The line stretched down the…
Lost and Found Blueprints
Many times when we are doing renovation projects, we are left to our own resources to figure out how the building was designed and built. We were recently across the street from our studio, walking through the basement of one of the buildings at the old Fidelity block, (which will become the new Congress Square project), when we came across some drawings of the buildings…
Exploring Possibilities at Back Bay Station
As part of our work exploring options for renovating Back Bay Station for Boston Properties, we went on site with a lift operator, structural engineer, and preservation expert to determine how to best restore the wood arches. Originally built and opened in the 1980s, Back Bay Station will be undergoing a transformation in the coming years to modernize it and…
Aerial Views of Greybarn Phase 1
Last week we received new aerial photos of the construction of our Greybarn Residential Development on Long Island. This new, mixed-use neighborhood in Amityville, New York, is located at the prominent intersection of Sunrise Highway and Route 110 and will contain 500-residential units and retail, spread over eight shingle-style buildings with gambrel roofs. We are currently in the first of five…
Mirbeau named Top 100 Hotels and Resorts in the World
We were thrilled to see the Arrowstreet designed Mirbeau Inn and Spa at the Pinehills in Plymouth honored by Condé Nast Traveler’s 28th Annual Readers’ Choice Awards. Mirbeau made the coveted list of “Top 100 Hotels and Resorts in the World,” earning an overall score of 93.59. It was also ranked number six among the “Top 20 Resorts in New…
Building Minority Report
Last Friday evening one of our new team members, Stephen Zuber, spoke at an Arrowstreet Design Forum about some work he had done with interactive multimedia environments. Right out of the Tom Cruise film “Minority Report,” Stephen’s prior project for a university in Texas involved creating a large display wall which was visible to any viewer in the space, was able…
Adaptive Migration in Urban Planning
Last week, I attended the 3rd annual ACCO Rising Seas Summit, which brought more than 300 professionals together to highlight the interrelationships between sea level rise, climate change, and extreme events. One topic discussed that is particularly interesting was adaptive migration, which looks at the affects an influx of new residents would have on an outside community if they were…