21 Boston – 30 – Revealing

As more and more of the perimeter scaffolding comes down, more and different portions of the building’s facades have been revealed. What’s not always clear is what the ‘look’ of the various facades tells us about the building. I thought it might be interesting to look at some. Shortly after the photo above, the scaffolding in front of the future deli / plaza was removed.

As is quite obvious, the facade of the Deli is made of red brick. In fact, one of the messages of the facade is that when you see red brick, it will indicate that retail is located there, basically for the Safeway and its components. Here’s the Deli elevation:

It will have view windows on either side with a service window in the center where you can order and receive food for take-out or for eating in the plaza. The brickwork also tells another story when the shadows reveal the pattern.

Some of the bricks have been set slightly out from the face of the wall so that they are accentuated by the sun-shadows. This tells a story (the Deli is a special place) by borrowing the look of an older construction technique. In original brick construction the walls were built two or three bricks thick because one brick was not strong enough. To make the wall work structurally the thicknesses had to be tied together. This was done by turning a brick sideways every so often so that it created a bridge between the outer and inner layers. Typically these were called header bricks. Over the years, masons in different areas spaced the headers in interesting patterns, the one above being similar to Flemish Bond with three stretchers (the bricks between each pair of headers). What’s actually going on in this modern version is that there is a concrete structure behind one layer of brick with an airspace and sheet flashing between them. Metal lintel angles at the bottom and ties occasionally behind, work to support the brick and hold it in place.

Old meets new – nice touch.

Around the corner, on Crockett Street, the brick facade continues – to reference the Safeway, and it’s also used to frame the automobile entrance to the store garage. No special brick patterns here, though. Above the brick are the multiple levels of housing where several visual devices are in play. As you may remember from the construction process, the housing is built up of layers (floors) of prefabricated wooden wall elements, brought in by truck, lifted by the tower crane, and anchored in place, a floor at a time. The design dilemma is that if all that wood were left as is, it would be hard to distinguish the various parts of the three buildings and the overall effect would also be massive. So the design developed several ‘languages’ to give different parts of the buildings different looks. This also helps to give some scale to the building forms. In the picture above left, you’re looking at the south end of Building C which is essentially black with white “frames” overlaid for scale. But across the ‘alley gap’ to the right the treatment differs.

Here, Building B is mostly white with black floor-level spandrels; but it’s fronted by one-story “townhouse apartments” which are enclosed by black brick. You can see the units more clearly around the corner on First Avenue (below).

The distinction in these units is that they each have their own ‘stoop’ entrance directly out through landscaping to First Avenue. I lived in a row house in Philadelphia. It will be interesting to see how these compare.

The treatment shown in the two pictures above continues down First Avenue where there’s a gap with skybridge hallways connecting it to Building A. At that point a totally different corrugated facade material has been introduced on the extension of Building A.

I like the corrugation but it does introduce a lot of black. Building A is still partly scaffolded but the overall impression is clear.

Building A is distinguished by its top and bottom. The top floor has some social gathering space and the bottom contains the Leasing and Management offices, visitor reception, tenant mail boxes, etc. Its west side is just coming into view below.

Ducking into the future service drive, you can see the juncture of corners of the three buildings and the different “languages” of their facades: A / B / C.

Stepping back a bit at Queen Anne Avenue and Boston Street gives the big picture.

And just in the time we’ve taken to walk around the project more of the red brick has been revealed at the retail level. When the scaffolding along the Queen Anne Avenue sidewalk comes down, the entire retail level will be recognizable.

One final note about the language of the facade: the Queen Anne Avenue side.

Here the “Big Frames” approach has been used to visually articulate the facade and help to moderate its bulk. These frames plus the extended balconies and stepped-back upper floors all work to help a very big building fit into its urban village neighborhood.

21 Boston – 29 – Cornered

As more of the exterior finishes get completed the form of the final building becomes visible. This is particularly noticeable at the project corners, as here at the corner of Queen Anne Avenue and Crockett Street.

The exterior materials have been selected and located to give the building a kind of visual language that explains what’s happening in the interior. The large, black facades have been “framed” by the light tan brick outlines that, along with the corner setback, emphasize the important visual character of the housing. This will be enhanced at the street level by a band of red brick (just starting to be visible – look behind the stop sign on the lower right) which will add as a ‘wrapper’, signaling where the retail shops, including Safeway, are located.

Just up Crockett Street, the scale of the housing along 1st Avenue North gets a different treatment.

Here, the housing above is white, with a strong base of dark brick that wraps the townhouse apartments that anchor the project along First Avenue. Although a little difficult to make out in this view, this is also where the housing levels have multiple set-backs to provide terraces that take advantage of the sunny, south-facing orientation.

The north-east corner of the project features Building A, which houses the leasing and management offices at grade level and creates a strong vertical statement above.

It’s still hard to make out the facade here because of the scaffolding and the fact that it’s proceeding in stages; but it’s clear that it will have distinctive top and bottom floors.

And finally, at Queen Anne Avenue and North Boston Street, the project steps back to provide a recessed corner wrapping around the existing street-level retail.

I suspect that these retail merchants are looking forward to the construction being succeeded by several hundred new resident/shoppers. The general plan is for the new Safeway store to open this fall, followed by the housing next spring.

21 Boston – 28 – Genieuses

As the 21 Boston housing and commercial project emerges from behind it’s construction scaffolding, the method of working on the exterior has changed as well. Many of the elements, such as balconies, railings, finishes and some windows now need to be installed individually instead of in groups from the scaffolding. Enter the genieuses. Although Genie is a proprietary name (note there’s a Skyjack also on the job), I like the implication that genies have some magic skills for getting the jobs done.

Below, you can see a relatively recent view of the southwest corner, with two of the genies working on balconies on the Queen Anne Avenue side of the project. Basically, they pick up the materials for one balcony at a time and raise them, including the installer, to the next unit that needs one. The installer does all the maneuvering of the Genie from the basket / platform at the end of the boom, including driving the vehicle.

Here’s a view looking up Crockett Street where two of these lifts are doing two different types of lifts: a balcony installation and a sheetrock delivery.

Here’s a close-up of the delivery and installation of the balcony components.

And here, sheetrock is being plunged through an opening where the windows have not yet been installed. This work is more delicate than it appears. Sheetrock, especially in bundles like this one, is HEAVY, so it can’t be moved quickly or allowed to damage the building or be damaged itself. Workmen inside the building slide pairs of sheets off the lift and set them on the floor – backbreaking work if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Closer to the ground, at the open corner of the project where there will be a plaza, another workman applies the appropriate layers of vapor barrier protection to the canopy areas.

One of the key uses of vapor barrier is to shield walls of different materials from water penetration, in effect wrapping the rough construction before the finishes are applied – in this case the dark red brick that will define the grade level Safeway spaces.

A few other interesting views have been exposed now that the scaffolding is mostly down. In the design process it was decided to leave a visual slot through the project from north to south, approximately where the alley would have been – if there had been an alley. Here’s the view looking north from Crockett towards Boston Street.

This sits right above the entrance to the Safeway store parking garage. The other view looks south from Boston towards Crockett street – and frames one of Queen Anne’s vertical communication towers in the process.

In some places, scaffolding with its protective mesh is still in place, such as here at the corner of Crockett Street and 1st North.

The work going on behind the mesh will make a major contribution to the appearance of the project as well as introduce a different form of housing. This area is being clad in a dark brick, the use of which defines the zone where the townhouse/apartments will be located. These will be unique in that they will have entrances via stoops directly to the sidewalk.

A couple different views are starting to show the ways in which this project is settling into the neighborhood context. Here’s one looking north on Queen Anne Avenue from the area in front of the Towne.

Once the red brick base has been installed, the general massing approach similarities will become evident – not enough to confuse the two projects, but enough to reinforce the housing over retail character of the street as a whole. This can also be appreciated at a distance from the neighborhood.

From this perspective, Queen Anne Avenue merges these forms visually and underlines the location of the spine of the urban village.