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.

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.

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.”

In a continuing effort to celebrate New England modernism, Utile made a pilgrimage to the Gropius House - designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in 1938 - in Lincoln, MA. Although many of the group had been there previously, the warm evening light offered opportunity for new appreciation. A German-themed party, replete with beer, brats and pretzels rounded out the evening. Prost!

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.

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 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 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 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.”

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.