Chris Genter of Utile recently returned from Quebec, where he visited A. Lacroix et Fils Granite, a family-owned company that is supplying and cutting the granite pavers for the Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion. The pavers will form a 40-foot-by-55-foot granite floor map of the Harbor Islands Park. Each element of the map–water, land, islands, and tidal zone–will be represented by a different finish of Atlantic Black granite. For the mockup paver, Lacroix created a set of puzzle-like interchangeable parts so we could better judge the most effective combination of colors and textures.

Lacroix has developed a clever technique for creating these challenging pavers. The granite is finished with a combination of thermal, water-jet, and sandblast to achieve the desired colors and finishes. Using a digital file of the map, the granite is then water-jet cut with remarkable precision into shapes that are assembled to create the final paver. The contour lines on each island are also water-jet cut from a digital file, then hand-tooled to accentuate the contract of each line.

Read all about the Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion groundbreaking, see the concrete formwork mockups, and learn about the process of designing the curvature of the roof. And stay tuned for more photos as the Harbor Islands Pavilion progresses!

A week after winning an award for significant neighborhood rehabilitation from the Boston Preservation Alliance, Zumix has been awarded LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. Zumix is intended to be a green building demonstration project for nonprofits and the neighborhood of East Boston.

Check out Arch Daily for the great feature on Utile’s Moose Hill House, a single family residence completed in 2008. Also, stay tuned for more information on UtileHome, an exciting new initiative geared towards the design of single family homes and interiors!

Utile’s renovation of the old East Boston firehouse, completed last winter, has just been awarded this year’s Significant Neighborhood Improvement Award by the Boston Preservation Alliance! From the BPA website: Built in 1923, the Engine 40 Firehouse originally serviced the Jeffries Point neighborhood of East Boston and eventually housed the Boston Fire Boat.  Long vacant, and severely dilapidated, the building was purchased in 2005 by ZUMIX, Inc., a non-profit cultural organization dedicated to building community through the arts.  Extensive renovations re-established the building as a prominent fixture in the neighborhood and created a 9,000 square foot facility to increase programming space for ZUMIX students.  The interior was masterfully adapted to house a state of the art performance center, sound studios, practice rooms, classroom space, a recording studio and administrative space, with a few reminders of the firehouse, including the pipe banisters in the stairwells and the original fire pole. The exterior boasts custom made, red firehouse doors, Tudor styling, and the station badge in cast stone on the front of the building. The project is also pursuing a LEED Silver Certification.

Recently, as a special Friday LunchMEAT, the entire Utile staff participated in the firm’s first ever U-til-e-Ku-cha, a Pecha-Kucha style presentation of some of the firm’s currently active projects. With just 5 slides and 30 seconds per slide, staff gave concise overviews of projects between bites of pizza. Exercises like this not only help team members to practice communicating their work, but also facilitate the exchange of ideas within the firm.

Christina Crawford of Utile and Jason Schrieber of Nelson\Nygaard recently presented the outcome of a public parking garage and parking management feasibility study for Downtown Medford, Massachusetts. The study included test-fit scenarios for a 178-car garage on a municipal parking lot located immediately behind prime retail spaces along High Street. Crawford and team explored two facade options: an ivy-covered Green Garage with a sculptural stair in the corner facing the pedestrian-oriented commercial street and a brick garage that picks up its language-cues from early 20th century brick commercial buildings in Medford and other Massachusetts cities. Both garage options include a PV array on the roof, covered bicycle parking, LED lighting, and a linear bioswale that captures the stormwater from the upper level of the garage. The proposals and the comments at the public meeting were covered by the Boston Globe.

Matthew Littell, Utile principal, was a guest this week on Radio Boston, hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti. Littell and MIT’s Tom Piper were invited to discuss the success and failings of the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Downtown Boston. Listen here for a recording of the segment. Utile, under Littell’s leadership, recently completed the draft guidelines for future development along the Greenway. The document can be downloaded from the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s website. Comments are due by Monday, June 21. We urge all architects and urban designers interested in the future of the City to weigh in with detailed suggestions and comments.

Last Thursday Utile took a field trip, organized by architect Chris Milford, to visit the Ames Estate in Easton, Massachusetts.  This was to celebrate Utile’s contribution to the successful campaign to protect the historic Ames Shovel Shops. The Ames Shovel Shops is part the North Easton historic district that contains a large collection of H.H. Richardson buildings in the Northeast.  See article describing the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Most Endangered sites.

Utile has been hired to conceptualize, design, and produce the Complete Streets manual for the City of Boston. The Utile team, led by Ryan Sullivan and Corey Zehngebot, is working closely with Nick Jackson of the Toole Design Group and Vineet Gupta and Charlotte Fleetwood of the Boston Transportation Department, on the layout and graphic language of the emerging guidelines. To better frame the assignment, the team researched best practices examples from other North American and European cities. Utile is inventing new kinds of drawings and information graphics to better describe multi-modal streets, sustainable storm water approaches, and a fully conceived taxonomy of urban street types.

Under unseasonably tropical skies, the Boston Harbor Island Alliance and the National Park Service co-hosted the official ground-breaking of the Harbor Park Pavilion on May 3. Reflective of the jurisdictional complexity of the project, representatives from dozens of state agencies were there to extol the virtues of inter-agency “partnerships.” One added bonus of the army of stakeholders: there were scores of people there in helpful-looking uniforms from National Park Rangers in official Smokey the Bear hats to Rose F. Kennedy Greenway Conservancy staff in their sporty yellow shirts.

Mayor Menino and US Representative Michael Capuano were the featured speakers. Capuano’s brief but engaging speech reinforced our opinion that he would have defeated Scott Brown if he had won the Democratic nomination for US Senator. As has been typical of these events in the past few years, the design team was the last group to get the stage for a photo op, and long after the dignitaries had departed.

The construction fence goes up May 10th and the pavilion is scheduled to be completed within a year.