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FP3 a conversation with David Hacin and Scott Thomson on urban revitalization in Boston, MAMarkus Berger and Heinrich Hermann

1 Robert Campbell, “A design that’s on Point: South Boston condo complex fits its surroundings”, in The Boston Globe, April 19, 2009.

The urban revitalization development FP3 (named for the

three buildings it is comprised of in Boston’s Fort Point

Channel historic district) by Hacin + Associates Inc. has

received national accolades including a prestigious AIA

Housing award. Robert Campbell praised it in the Bos-

ton Globe as “a new model of how to go about putting

new wine in the old bottle of a landmark neighborhood”

and “a mix of thoughtful preservation with energetic in-

vention, exactly the formula any thriving city needs.”1

It adaptively reused two turn-of-the-century brick ware-

houses and filled an adjacent cavity with a third one, and

added a three-story rooftop addition above these three

structures. The resulting 140,000 sf mixed use building

contains 99 loft condominiums (including 5 affordable

units and 3 affordable live/work artist studios), restau-

rant/retail space, and a lobby/art gallery. (Fig 2, aerial

view of complex and context)

Swiss born architect, David Hacin AIA, received his

Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton University

and his Master of Architecture from Harvard. David has

practiced architecture in a number of well known firms

in New York and Boston and founded his own office,

Hacin + Associates, Inc in 1993. Winner of numerous

awards, H+A’s retail and residential projects have been

featured in a wide range of international books and

publications. Davis has leadership roles in a number

of professional and civic organizations such as Design

Industry Groups of Massachusetts [DIGMA], Boston Civic

Design Commission, Boston Society of Architects and

Boston Center for the Arts. David has taught architectural

studios at both RISD and Northeastern University.

Scott Thomson is a registered architect who joined H+A

in 1997. Before coming to H+A, Scott worked at CBT

Architects in Boston and Frank Gehry and Associates

in California on various projects for Disney. He received

his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Boston

Architectural College as valedictorian in 1992 where he

was awarded the John Worthington Ames Scholarship,

the AIA Henry Adams Medal and the John Steffian

Centennial Thesis Award honorable mention. Scott is a

Senior Associate at H+A.

75

1 view Congress Street street towards the city

76

IntAR: Which challenges did you face when you embarked on this work, politically, economically,

technically, and otherwise? And later, because you practice in many parts of the country and

abroad, we would be interested in how you think about Boston in comparison to other cities.

David Hacin (DH): Some of the challenges were universal and some unique to this context. Residential

use was new for the district. There was some artist’s housing in the vicinity but not in the district itself.

The developer owned a number of properties here and had a vision for a multi-faceted, multi-use district,

of which this building would be the signature piece. There were a lot of political difficulties, so we hired

a political consultant for the approval process. The biggest difficulty was that the project required a

significant increase of square footage above what it was zoned for to be economically viable.

Scott Thomson (ST): We had to apply for zoning variances for both height and FAR [Floor Area Ratio].

The zoning was in transition. They had an interim overlay zone originally meant to last only five years (but

long overdue) and we were the first ones ‘in the water’ with our project. While there had been others,

they were typical smaller, ad-hoc transformations. Ours was going to be much larger: the first fully code-

compliant new construction, involving comprehensive restoration and seismic upgrading.

DH: It was really two buildings and an open site, most of a whole city block. The block included a fire

station that technically was not part of the project, but ‘de facto’ became so because of the air rights

above it. We had to meet with the fire fighters for the windows that looked over the fire station and we

made upgrades to their building to get their permission. To Scott’s point, the renovation was so extensive

and comprehensive that, financially, it required additional square footage. The site was in a pending

historic district but the historic regulations had not yet gone into effect when we went forward. So we

applied principles from other historic districts in the city to our approach of how the addition should be

done - which was integral to how we explained the project to the community, to city officials, and so forth.

IntAR: What were some of these principles?

DH: Essentially we concluded that the ‘Congress Street view corridor’ (Fig 7) - a very clear and largely

intact piece of period urban architecture – should be preserved and the addition be set back so the

dominant cornice lines and image of Congress Street are maintained. However, at other key vistas, it

was really important to assert the new building identity, including its new components. We saw these

opportunities chiefly down A Street (a cross street) and coming in from downtown over the fire station

(Fig 4, and Fig 5, cross view, with the new addition fully visible). We recognized these vistas as signature

moments and really expressive of what we were trying to do. At the same time, we did view-analyses

that, interestingly, panned out correctly … you actually see what we expected you to see and don’t see

what we predicted you wouldn’t … a lot of people couldn’t believe that that much volume could be

added to the building while still respecting the historic view corridor. There were a lot of folks in the

preservation community who were very skeptical. There were political concerns about precedent setting

… you know, if we built three stories on this building, is everyone in the district then going to want three

stories on theirs, and so forth. Ours was a fairly unique situation, though, because we controlled the

entire block (it was going to be across several buildings) which gave us the flexibility to deal with some

of these issues more artfully.

2 aerial view of FP3

3 graphic showing planned additions

4 roof top view of Congress Street

2 3

4

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IntAR: It is surprising how you were able to do a both massive and at the same time very

discrete addition.

ST: Right. We preserved key historic views. We always had in mind a tour guide with a group of tourists

sitting across the street looking at the whole building, and from there they could not see the addition,

but from other views they obviously would.

DH: That was actually very important to us. I was defensive about the notion of not being able to see

the addition because I felt I wanted to show what we were doing, but doing it in ways that showed

we were respectful of preservation while at the same time asserting a new identity for the district and,

even beyond it, for the larger city … and this gets us into the larger discussion about Boston, where the

identity and character of the city is very much a collage of preservation and a new layer of construction, a

new layer of design that expressed the fact that these districts were in constant change and flux over the

years. The interesting thing about residential use is that it tends to be forever. I was just in New York this

past week, and when you are in Midtown and look down over the fragments of the City from the 30s,

40s, 50s, and even 60s, they had to be the residential fragments because those are the buildings owned

by hundreds of individuals and the acquisition and turnover of those properties is quite impossible.

IntAR: When you talk about addition, there really are two additions: the ‘new’ addition on top

and the other one an insert. They address the existing building in different ways and politically

they were probably thought about differently as well.

DH: Yes, but I must say we are quite convinced it was the right thing to do. The ‘infill’ building solved a

lot of problems. It allowed us to have at-grade, handicapped access which was much more complicated

in the older buildings; it allowed the older buildings and their retail areas to really maintain the character

they traditionally had as show rooms and retail spaces. But we are always looking at what the character

of a building is or was. Especially in a missing building that was like a missing tooth. In a district that

was holistically conceived, what was that missing tooth? We looked at images of the building that stood

there before. We went to great pains to make sure that the façade had the same level of depth, shade,

shadow and scale that adjacent buildings would have. A lot of the negative reaction people have to

contemporary architecture in historic districts is not necessarily the contemporary quality of the design

but actually the fact that it is very flat – very thin, or reads in a very different way from the adjacent

buildings. We wanted to make sure that all of those details, including the color and style of the brick,

would play in a very similar way against the other buildings but were nonetheless contemporary. It is

a contemporary interpretation of what had stood on the site. The addition on the top of the building,

rather than just sitting on top, really reaches down, engages, and clips in to the dominant volume of the

block – so that it is not one thing on top of another, or one thing beside another, but they are actually

integrated and reliant on one another – each a part of one thing.

ST: The two buildings we started with were completely separate at one point, completed by separate

firms, separate operations... Obviously, you can now say they are one building but you can also say we

preserved them, and their interiors as well - we preserved the individual buildings that were there and

5 view from A Street

6 view from corner Congress Street and A Street

7 ‘Congress Street view corridor’

5

6

7

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feel that this was an important goal. The building that had stood next to the fire house (the ‘missing

tooth’ after it burned down) had in fact predated the other two. The whole district was built ‘to suit’. If

you were a firm, you came there, told them how much space you needed, and they would build it for

you, all done by the same architect. There were two architects who built all the buildings over a period

of years. The block we were on progressed historically, starting with the firehouse and moving eastward.

We wanted our building to read as three facades from the street which had to relate to one other in a

meaningful way. For example, the first building had a progression of three windows, the second had one

of four, and in the missing one we intentionally made it five. We thus tried to subtly link the buildings

through this pattern and rhythm rather than literally trying to unite them physically. The rooftop is in

some sense an ‘other’ thing.

DH: Regarding the special rhythm of windows of the new building, our inside joke was the lower

portion was classical music and the upper portion akin to jazz. There is a similarity in the design of the

new addition on top because we expressly intended to convey modernity and transformation. About

this interesting issue of the whole vs. its parts: Boston, as an older city, has a fine grain and a scale that

people find very human and attractive -- very ‘European’ for lack of a better word. But the pressure of

modern development is such that its size and scale is so much larger than the incremental development

that has traditionally happened in the city. How larger development gets inserted into a city with a very

fine grained fabric has always been, and will always be, a relatively difficult problem to solve. This project

was interesting because it really is quite large but it is broken down visually in terms of how pedestrians

see it – they can see the building as three buildings or as one. It reads at a different scale than what it

actually is, which helps it fit in with the district.

ST: For me the irony of preservation is that the very forces that now want to have a large block in a

single building are the same forces that, in their day, created these buildings. This area, in particular,

was a purely speculative venture by private money. When you look down A Street you see how our two

buildings, below the addition, come together in a way that had nothing to do with aligning with the

cross street. They just built it as requested – which is part of the charm of this district. What we tried to

do was create a financially viable building that preserves that kind of value and does not lose that energy.

IntAR: You are saying it actually has a hybrid nature. It still has the characteristics of what it

appears as but has another nature too.

ST: Yes, it is a ‘both/and’ building. If you compare that to tearing the buildings down and rebuilding a

similar building with three facades that are suggestive of the three buildings that were once there – you

could say our building is no better - but I think what we did has more authenticity.

DH: Yes, we’ve done projects where we had to retain the facades only – there is something more satisfying

about a project where the buildings themselves were preserved and adaptively reused, admittedly, in

part, through gymnastics. But these are the real buildings that are still there, not just an illustration

or a façade or a suggestion of what might have been or once was. They really are being reused. But,

back to the point of the Boston/New York contrast -- it was interesting for me to contrast how Central

Park West is a preserved row of buildings and, of course, a historic district, whereas Midtown is really

8 framing of roof top addition

9 core steel erection

10 satellite view during construction

11 graphic showing new piling and core hole cutout in red over historical drawing

12 longitudinal section showing old and new piling

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DRAWING TITLE

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a more speculative area where a building can come down and a bigger one built on the same site.

Boston is a different city than New York. New York may be a more purely capitalist expression of real

estate transformation, where the highest and best or most profitable use of a site is what ultimately is

constantly transforming the city. Once a building or a block has run its course there is not much romance

about preserving it except for certain very particular districts that happen to be residential, because that’s

where people live and the political will for preservation is. In Boston, the whole identity of the city is

collectively more tied up with its scale, its layers of history, and with being able to read the revolutions of

the 1700s and, more specifically, the 1800s and 1900s -- each decade and each generation of evolution

– and that’s what makes it a unique place and gives it a different identity from a city like New York and

even from Europe. Why? Because Europe really has these very preserved downtown districts and then

new business districts are being built outside or separately from these older districts, like in Paris. Boston

is kind of a crazy hybrid – where there is a bit of a capitalist American city where things are changing

but, also this sort of romance about our identity and the real care for preservation and adaptive reuse. It

is an interesting kind of hybrid, neither one nor the other.

IntAR: Can you think of another American city comparable to Boston?

DH: I think San Francisco is a bit like that. That comparison is made frequently. Chicago is more like

New York. There are monuments that are preserved. But the notion of preserving districts is really not

self evident.

The landmarks situation in New York is this: is that building a landmark?; if it is, then we keep it; if its

not, then we can replace it. Cities like Boston or San Francisco are really fabric cities. It is the fabric more

than individual buildings that make the city. In Boston people always complain that there is not enough

striking, monumental architecture. I think to some extent that is true but on the other hand Boston has

a more beautiful fabric than most American cities.

IntAR: Going back to the question of what you preserve. Usually it is stones and windows, but

in this case it is much bigger. It includes the whole block which, in turn, is part of the bigger

fabric. You talk about views from this street and that street but is it not really about some

layers of memory, e.g. of people who have worked in the area once and are experiencing it

now, in a relapse of time, of memory?

DH: Yes, if you want to walk into a restaurant e.g., you walk up the stairs, you walk through a foyer,

you go up a little staircase to a restaurant - that’s because the building has depth, is alive. It is not like

you just walk through some sort of a portal into another world. You really are inhabiting the original,

authentic building.

IntAR: In the rear there was this beautiful awkward column that nobody would put there, in

this beautiful awkwardness.

DH: One of the really interesting things about the building is the technique of feathering new columns

through the older structure and having the old columns and the new columns co-exist side by side.

13 Terrasse of a living unit14 living unit

15 lobby area

13 14

1413

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The old columns in wood; the new columns in steel, but on a slipped grid (Fig 11, 12). They had to be,

because the grids couldn’t overlap. At first it bothered me that things didn’t align – you know, architects

want everything to align – but in fact it is one of the most revealing moments about the building where

you really understand that there are these two different structures that are inhabiting the same place

at the same time and they interact with one another in an interesting way. We also had to seriously

reinforce the brick walls of the building. It is built on fill and the area is in a significant seismic zone –

which most people don’t realize about Boston – it is in a quieter area in terms of frequency of seismic

events but it has the potential to be cataclysmic…

ST: … So that’s the challenge. Can you introduce a new thing and can it inhabit the same space without

taking out the former interior.

IntAR: When you said the columns interact … this almost creates a story, extending the idea

of preservation as a narrative, by having a new system which behaves different from the old

system …

ST: The new structural system was dependent on the old one. There is a rhythm of the beams that

were there, that suggested a module. There was an initial process to understand the rhythms of the old

building and that generated the rhythms of the new building because they had to fit together. It wasn’t

an intervention in the artistic sense of say the rooftop structure in Vienna by COOP Himmelblau, or

others. These works are art …

DH: Very interestingly, some of the strongest opponents to our project were artists, because they viewed

our project in threatening terms – displacement, changing the district … which to them represented

the possibility of evictions. We fortunately didn’t displace artists, and made efforts to incorporate a

gallery and artist’s housing and to do whatever we could to reinforce the arts uses. I’ll never forget one

community meeting where some artist stood up and really just railed on us, and I said, “You have to

understand that this is our art, that architecture is an art. So, when you criticize our art in the terms you

are using, think of me criticizing one of your paintings or one of your works in the same terms. Do it

respectfully.” Your mentioning COOP Himmelblau reminded me of this. Really, a lot of the decisions and

choices that we made, such as the expression of the upper floors, are compositional. They did not just

logically flow from some system. The art of architecture, we like to think, is there as well. This was an

interesting discussion with the community.

IntAR: Did things change from then on?

DH: Yes and no. It took them aback … of course, as architects we think of architecture as an art but a

lot of artists haven’t necessarily made that connection … so that was interesting.

ST: It is an ongoing dialogue. I think the opposition was really from a very small group of organized

people who wanted to protect the area against any change.

DH: I think it was the fear of the unknown. These issues resolved themselves and the building is actually

very well received at this point … Looking back, and to conclude, we take preservation very seriously but

we believe strongly that what is new should be expressed as such. This project illustrates that idea. The

85

element of preservation was very rigorous here, down to the very careful replacement of bricks in the existing façade and

so on, and yet very clear about what is new and what is old. The new layer is as meaningful as the old layer.

Thinking back to the period of urban renewal in Boston which was done to ‘save’ the city, with its demolition of the West

End; the building of the elevated highway through downtown; the intended demolition of the South End, which didn’t

happen only because the Feds did not have the funds for the demolition… I think Boston was traumatized by excessive

destruction. It is only now beginning to get to the point where the city is secure enough in the knowledge that its historic

fabric is going to be preserved -- because it has been institutionally preserved -- where it can begin to take risks and add

new architecture, and become more offensive than defensive in its approach to new buildings and new design … but, this

is only because the fear of loss has subsided to a point where people can begin to look forward again.

Editors note: Drink, Fig. 16 and Sportello, Fig. 17 are the work of C & J Katz Studio, Boston

16 Drink, bar designed by C & J Katz Studio17 Sportello, cafe designed by C & J Katz Studio

16 17