Hyde Blakemore featured in Boston Globe
Utile Principal Matthew Littell was featured in a recent cover story in the Boston Globe Home section about a new generation of affordable housing. Ted Siefer writes: “Among the humble brick and vinyl suburban-style houses along Hyde Park Avenue in Roslindale, the Hyde-Blakemore Condominiums stand out. There are the mahogany-louvered fences, the solar panels, and the flying-V roof line on the main building, which besides looking cool, channels rainwater into a landscaped rock garden.” Utile worked with Urban Edge, A Roxbury-based community development corporation, on the project.
Siefer continues: “Littell said Hyde-Blakemore represents a new stage in the evolution of affordable housing.”Starting in the 1980s, after the big brick public housing model became invalid, these wood frame Easter egg-colored villages began appearing,” he said. “Gradually they became more in synch with the adjacent neighborhood. What we’re seeing now is a much better second generation of that.”
Landworks Studio designed the project’s landscape strategy which enhances privacy between buildings and addresses environmental issues, such as managing storm water run-off through grading and the use of bioswales (in collaboration with civil engineer Samiotes).
Utile is also collaborating with Urban Edge on the residential portion of the Jackson Square complex in Jamaica Plain, and the firm is working with Chelsea Neighborhood Developers on a 48-unit affordable apartment complex, part of the city’s massive Box District redevelopment plan.”
Click here to view the Globe’s photo gallery of the project.
Utile is the architect for Blu, a start-up housing manufacturer
Matthew Littell and Peter Crowley from Utile have been collaborating with the team from Blu Homes on a family of manufactured green homes that are now coming to market. Bill Haney, Co-Founder and President , has started or helped start more than 25 companies in five countries which have raised more than $500MM to fund novel technologies for and approaches to traditional industry. In addition, he has helped start the national environmental advisory board for the Environmental Protection Agency and has served on boards for Harvard and MIT.
Blu Homes are offered in a range of sizes and configurations to meet a range of price points and to work for rural, suburban and urban sites. Unlike the house-on-legs character of other contemporary modular housing, Blu Homes can be ordered with porch, deck and trellis components that connect interior spaces to the landscape and promote indoor/outdoor living. In addition, Blu Homes include thoughtful thresholds at entrances and between the living and bedroom areas.
Tim Love’s Northeastern Housing studios featured in alumni magazine
Northeastern’s housing studios were featured in the Spring 2008 issue of the Northeastern University Alumni Magazine. The article highlighted the program’s focus on brownfield sites in cities such as Somerville and Chelsea and the expectation that students grapple with “real life” issues such as development economics and regulatory frameworks during the design process.
Author Karen Feldster writes, “Tim Love agrees that the Housing Studio gives students a big hurdle to jump. ‘One thing about the studio is the mind-numbing complexity of housing,’ he says. ‘It’s like teaching someone to play an instrument really well in just a semester. Students have to understand multifamily housing, which includes the individual unit itself – kitchen, bedroom, living room, other rooms – and how you aggregate those units around corridors, staircases, elevators. In the world of architectural design, it’s like a Rubik’s cube.’ Selecting particular sites in the Boston areas makes the work even more complicated for students, because they have to design with real-world constraints in mind.”