Tim Love’s review published in the Harvard Design Magazine

Tim Love’s review of the Harvard Design Magazine Symposium “Can Design Improve Life in Cities? The Cases of Los Angeles, London and Chicago” was published in the online version of the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of the Harvard Design Magazine. In the essay, Love critiques the emphasis on signature projects by American municipal leaders and looks to current developments in London as a model for a more nuanced integration of design with public policy. As Love comments, “most impressive was the presentation by Peter Bishop, Director of Design for London, a new governmental organization that “will coordinate the mayor’s architectural and urban design strategies.” The diagrams, plans, and renderings of the several ambitious but surgical urban design interventions in central London were unparalleled at the symposium and equal the best urban design work being done today.”

Click here to read the article.

Historic Treasure Trove Found in School Attic

During the construction of Schoolhouse Lofts, Utile’s conversion of a 19th-century brick school in Worcester into 28 condominiums, the construction team discovered a file cabinet in the attic containing continuous school attendance records dating back to 1897, the year of the first class in the school. The early books, bound in twine and written in ink script, reveal not only each child’s address, birth date and birth location, but also the parents’ nationality, the teachers’ level of experience and salary. The development team contacted the Worcester Historical Museum, which has taken the school records and are cataloging them, as well as all ancillary materials found in the cabinet, for their archives and for the use of future researchers.

As the archivists noted, the remarkably seamless records track the life of one Worcester neighborhood through an entire century. A letter from President Herbert Hoover, entreating the teachers and children to “refrain from heedless eating” during WWI shortages, and an early version of the Pledge of Allegiance were copied from the archive and framed, and now hang in the converted school. Various media outlets carried the story, including NECN and the Worcester Telegram.

Christina Crawford Lectures at Rudolph House

Christina Crawford gave a lecture on the residential work of late modernist architect Paul Rudolph at the New England Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (NESAH) event this past weekend. The talk was part of a tour of Rudolph’s 1956 Yanofsky House, in Chestnut Hill, one of the only remaining Rudolph Houses in New England. In her talk, she tested Rudolph’s written interest in “regionalist” architecture against this one work, comparing the house to other seminal modern houses in the Boston area which also expressed interest in contextual specificity. The house itself was a treat to see: only 2,500 sf at the main level, its highly obsessive edge detailing, varied sequence of spaces, and expansive interior to exterior vistas made for a rich experience. The owners’ long and somewhat tortured process to restore the house was covered in the New York Times.

Christina is an active member of NESAH’s Board of Directors, and in that capacity gave a talk on her research on Ukrainian Constructivism this past fall.

Utile exhibits work at the pinkcomma gallery

Utile is one of ten firms collaborating on an installation and exhibition timed to coincide with the National AIA Convention in Boston. Entitled Parti Wall/Hanging Green, the installation will be hung for a week on a converted loft building on Wareham Street in Boston’s South End. The five-story piece will be visible from the pinkcomma gallery, where an exhibition of the collaborative design process and the works of the individual firms will be on display. The ten firms – all of which were formed in the past six years – joined together to form the Young Architects Boston Group in January. They have been meeting since January to conceive and plan the installation. The happy outcome of the process is a strengthened community of like-minded designers. Click here to see a video of the installation.

pinkcomma gallery

81b Wareham Street in the South End, Boston

Exhibition Dates: Friday, May 16 - Friday, June 6th

SoWa Artwalk Weekend Hours: May 17th/18th, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Gallery Hours: Monday—Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. or by appointment.

Photos by Mark Pasnik.

Utile featured in Architectural Record

Utile was one of six firms featured as Boston’s “Next Wave” in the May 2008 issue of Architectural Record. Hubert Murray writes “The firm’s approach is to develop a specific expertise in multi-family housing and leverage that into the development world and the expanded scope of developer-pragmatic urban design. Utile has now established itself as the leading proponent of edgy European-style housing throughout the Boston area. Teaching at Northeastern University and, with over,under, publishing the Urban Housing Atlas, are all facets of the firm’s single focused strategy. Now that the residential market is softening, the practice is taking a similar approach to the commercial market.”

Michael Kubo: LunchMEAT

Independent writer, editor and publisher Michael Kubo shared his work with Utile in March. As the founding editorial director of Actar Publishers, New York, Michael’s publications include The Function of Ornament, with Farshid Mousavi (2006), Desert America: Territory of Paradox (2006), Seattle Public Library (2004), Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark (2003), and The Yokohama Project (2002). Michael’s work challenges the typical conception of publications as tools for presenting research, and proposes that they can act as forms of research in themselves. In a lecture titled “Publishing as Practice,” Michael presented a series of recent research-driven publications to illustrate ways of using the book to give shape, structure and context to architectural ideas, independent of and sometimes beyond the constraints of building.

LunchMEAT (Meaningful, Engaging, and Apropos Talks) is a weekly, in-house program that gives us the opportunity to connect with designers, developers, architects, engineers, planners and academics on topics related to architecture and planning.

Utile team awarded Water Transportation Terminal project

Utile is the design lead for a multidisciplinary team that will design and engineer a ferry terminal in South Boston for the Massachusetts Port Authority. Led by HDR Engineering, Inc., the project team will design a water transportation terminal and adjacent public spaces, between the World Trade Center and Fish Pier on the South Boston waterfront. The new terminal will serve ferry and water taxi passengers and will contribute to an expanding water transportation network in Boston Harbor.

During the selection process, Utile developed several design options to better understand the relationship between land and water sheet and to explore tidal impacts and accessibility challenges.

Eran Ben-Joseph: LunchMEAT

Eran Ben-Joseph, a planning professor at MIT, joined Utile on Friday August 31st to share his work on urban design simulation tools. He discussed several prototypes for visualizing urban design proposals and their massing, environmental and transportation impacts. A collaboration between MIT’s planning department and the Media Lab, the projects rely on cameras, computers and screens to communicate building shadows, traffic patterns and other data in real-time while individuals work with physical models of topography and building massing.

Three to Teach at Northeastern University in the Fall 2007

Utile continues its strong links to the School of Architecture at Northeastern University.

It was recently announced by George Thrush, the program director, that Chris Genter, Matthew Littell, and Tim Love will be teaching at the School in the Fall. Genter will be coordinating and teaching the sophomore undergraduate design studio, Littell will be teaching the urban prototype graduate studio, and Love will be coordinating and teaching the undergraduate housing studio. In addition, Love teaches the undergraduate theory seminar.

At their June, 2007 meeting, the Board of Trustees of Northeastern University joined President Aoun and Provost Abdelal in granting Tim Love tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. Love was acknowledged for his award-winning design work, the influence of his critical writing and his excellent teaching.

New website in development

Utile is in the process of constructing a new website and blog. Our goal is to facilitate communication with clients, alliance partners and the design community. Our website, as much as our commissions, will be an important intellectual and creative outlet for the firm.

Let us know what you think.

Shauna Gillies-Smith LunchMEAT

On Friday June 19th, Shauna Gillies-Smith joined us for lunch and discussed innovative green roof design. After working with Martha Schwartz for several years, Shauna is establishing a new office - Ground Public Art & Urban Design - in order to specialize in the unique technical and aesthetic challenges of green roofs.

Utile in the Paper

On Sunday, the Boston Globe profiled three Utile projects located in South Boston.

The Projects featured were:
321 West Second Street
557/559 East Second Street
Trolley House

Click here to download a pdf of the entire article.