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.
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 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.