Bisnow: State of the Seaport

Join us at the Westin Boston Waterfront on Wednesday, February 23rd at 7:30 am as we participate in BisNow’s annual State of the Seaport event. Developers, architects, business owners, and industry leaders will  discuss transportation, housing, recreation, and the latest parcels slated for development.

/

Workforce Housing and Innovation Tenants

BisNow’s “The Future of Cambridge:  Innovation, Community Engineering and the Spread of the Kendall Square Phenomenon,” moderated by our old friend Rich McKinnon, was an interesting, insightful discussion between public (Tom Evans, the Executive Director of the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority, and Iram Farooq, Assistant City Manager of the City of Cambridge), and private (Alex Twining, CEO Twining Properties, and Lawrence…

/

Walking East Boston with ULI

This week a few of us attended a ULI walking tour of East Boston’s waterfront development. We enjoyed a water taxi ride over, and visited residential projects at various stages of development — one plans to lease by August, while another recently completed permitting. Each development has a retail component and public access to the water, including new water taxi…

/

What is the Future of Downtown?

One of the best things about great cities is that they adapt and change. Rail yards become new neighborhoods, and industrial districts become lofts, offices, and shopping centers. The ability of the urban fabric to evolve with the rapidly changing ways we live and work is part of the reason people and businesses are returning to the city core. It…

/

Retail & the City (and the suburbs, too)

Once upon a time, people lived in the same places where they worked and shopped. Like my grandparents, who lived over the butcher shop in Irvington, New Jersey. Their community was tied together by local retailers. Then, someone decided that it would better and cleaner and less bothersome to separate where we lived from where we worked, and from where…

/
Press

Meet the Architect Giving Manhattan’s Retail Stores a Refreshing Look

This week the New York Post profiled Bob Lowe and his work with brokers and retail owners in New York. Bob creates detailed renderings that show prospective tenants the possibilities for a storefront. In the fast paced world of Fifth Avenue retail, allowing a tenant to see exactly what their branded space could look like at a specific location is a valuable…

/

Where Is Retail Going Anyway?

Some say it’s going away. Some say it’s online. Others say it’s changing so fast that it’s impossible to know. While the role retail plays is changing, it remains a critical component of both the real estate industry and our public places.  Even if it’s more convenient to buy certain things online, the social act of going downtown (or to…

/

ULI Spring Meeting

The Urban Land Institute’s annual Spring Meeting is less than a month away! We will be joining other ULI members in Philadelphia from April 19th – 21st to learn and connect with our peers about the challenges facing the real estate and design industries today. See you there!

/

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…

/

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…

/