Urban branding

MARK FAVERMANN — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 22:25:45 GMT

The BCA’s ‘Inside::out’
The Boston Center for the Arts is a one-time white elephant morphing into an urban tiger.

STEPHEN STIMSON ASSOCIATES: Projecting outside what’s taking place inside.

The Boston Center for the Arts is a one-time white elephant morphing into an urban tiger. The complex was a cultural idea housed in a decrepit, deteriorating, cavernous space before the City of Boston and dedicated community leadership accomplished the restoration task. The structure has been used for a cyclorama, a colossal circular painting of the Battle of Gettysburg, a car dealership, and the Boston Flower Exchange. Today the BCA is a complex of varied buildings and exterior spaces in a single urban block in the restlessly chic South End, a hip non-profit performing and visual-arts complex.

The surrounding residential neighborhood is recognized as the largest Victorian-brick-rowhouse district in the United States. Reinventing, renovating, and restoring itself as an urban magnet over the last three decades, with a lot of the heavy lifting being done by the gay community, the South End is characterized by its four- and five-story red-brick houses, low-to-mid-rise modern housing developments, and relatively recent infusion of commercial streetscapes.

Tremont Street, Clarendon Street, Warren Avenue, and East Berkeley Street define the boundaries of the approximately 3.6-acre BCA Block. Tremont Street joins the South End to the rest of the city and has become a “restaurant row.” Although sidewalks are typically wide along Tremont Street, 10 to 20 feet, the BCA Plaza provides one of the few large open spaces. This is the tiger’s cage.

Lately, the tiger has been pacing. A visionary design competition, “Inside::out,” attracted some 70 proposals to link its cultural programs and artistic activities to neighbors and to the outside community. The design brief asked applicants to do this while visually stating the BCA’s sense of place and creating a clear and prominent sense of arrival. A distinguished jury chose five finalists.

The mission of the competition was straightforward: “To bring the arts outside and to bring the community in.” The BCA was looking to create an architecturally distinctive public space that would provide an exciting new identity for this arts block, position the BCA as a major arts destination, and build its urban brand by incorporating such architectural tools as gateways, wayfinding, paving, public art, street furniture, monuments, and notable physical icons.

In part because of the less-than-inspired new Stanford Calderwood Pavilion that was built in 2004, there’s a real urban-design need to integrate and balance the block. The east end is a rather site-unspecific bland that could be located in Framingham or Foxborough. The west end, which was built in the 19th century, has a patina of historic grace and is on the National Historical Register.

Motion pictures

MARK FAVERMANN — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 15:50:09 GMT

“Living in Motion: Design and Architecture for Flexible Dwelling” at the ICA
Like countless others, when I was a student and moving each year from dorm to apartment and then to another apartment, I made bookshelves out of bricks and planks of wood.

Like countless others, when I was a student and moving each year from dorm to apartment and then to another apartment, I made bookshelves out of bricks and planks of wood. These bookshelves represented simple yet flexible, low-maintenance contemporary domestic furnishing. Not only were they functional, they were also cost-effective and could easily expand or contract. I loved them. There is a human universality to dealing with and “owning” our environment.

American Olympic “maverick” skier Bode Miller grew up in an isolated New Hampshire log cabin without running water or electricity. This is an unusual circumstance that makes for good press, but it’s also a notable example of people living in a more adaptive environment. I knew an artist who lived in a yurt in the woods outside Portland, Maine. He seemed quite normal in conversation, dress, and even sense of humor. He was of the age that came to adulthood in the ’60s and ’70s and morphed, flexibly or painfully, from middle-class buttoned-up America to post-hippie lifestyles and careers. His decision to live in an adaptive, minimalist, alternative space was, like that of Bode Miller’s parents (also former hippies), an outgrowth of his times, culture, and education.

Architecture and design are art forms that we all live with each day. They seem less esoteric than the fine arts; perhaps that’s why everyone seems to have an opinion on our built environment. And why new construction, new object forms, and even related exhibitions can elicit such visceral reactions. The most creatively and universally designed objects often add materially to our enrichment, comfort, and exuberance. Just consider the iPod.

This sense of designer joy is palpable in the Institute of Contemporary Art’s “Living in Motion: Design and Architecture for Flexible Dwelling,” an exhibition that, organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, showcases a range of clever, often elegant furniture and sometimes beautiful furnishings and objects. Tracing flexible modes of living through centuries of design creativity, this show stretches across cultures and continents. The pieces underscore the history and tradition of the flexible, multi-functional well-designed and sometimes wonderful pieces of our contemporary domestic life.