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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.