Insight
Mayor Curtatone Visits Arrowstreet
Last week, Arrowstreet hosted our annual event to honor Somerville Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone. The fundraiser affords local business leaders and residents the opportunity to speak with Mayor Curtatone about the community, real estate, and plans for the City’s future.
It Starts With Light
Recently, I had the chance to visit the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The little art museum by Louis Kahn is one of those master works we study in architecture school, learning by re-drawing its plan, section, and details. It seems simple. Six rows of barrel vaults with some space left out in the middle for a small exterior garden. Concrete, travertine marble, and some drywall. But what Kahn did with those few things! …
Women’s Lunch Place Volunteer Session
On a recent Saturday morning, Arrowstreet sent three volunteers to help staff the early shift at the Women’s Lunch Place. A privately funded, non-profit organization operated almost entirely by volunteers, the Women’s Lunch Place provides meals and other services on a daily basis to the homeless and underprivileged women of Boston. Their kitchen and cafeteria are housed in a pleasant and brightly-lit space which Arrowstreet helped renovate in 2011 in the basement of the Church of the Covenant on Newbury Street…
Engehoej Kirke
I recently visited the beautiful and striking Enghǿj Kirke (church) in the northern part of Jutland, in Denmark. The building’s minimal form and details create a space that, while much smaller, recalls the volumetric feel of a cathedral. The inverted ‘V’ shape of the structure is meant to reference the underside of a ship, an apt reference in a country where the sea is only ever 45 minutes away. While one might expect that these elements (starkness and ships) be unique to this building, they are in fact prevalent in most Danish churches. The last two photographs, from a neighboring 16th century church, clearly illustrate these similarities.
Brooklyn Boulders in the News (Again)
Check out the article in this week’s Metro, featuring Brooklyn Boulders’ rock climbing gym – opening soon in Somerville. It features our renderings of the space and a snapshot of what’s to come…
Sustainability is Good Business
Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Boston Chamber event “Making the Business Case for Sustainability”. This was a panel discussion of the integration of sustainability into business with representatives Johanna Jobin from EMD Millipore, Carolyn Kaplan from Nixon Peabody LLP, and Tony Calandro from VOX Global. The panelists represented varying industries, from service to production, which provided a range of perspectives on what sustainability means to various sectors…
Excel Academy Gala
Last week Larry Spang, George Tremblay, and I had the pleasure of attending a fund raising celebration that was put on by Excel Academy Charter Schools. Excel serves the Boston area with three individual middle schools, one of which is a recently completed Arrowstreet project. With the recent approval of their charter expansion, they also plan to open a high school in the near future…
New Retail in White Plains, NY
On May 7th, our design team received the site plan approvals for a new retail project on Bloomingdale Road in White Plains, New York. Led by our fantastic new clients, Faros Properties and Caspi Development, we designed the building to work with the challenging topography of the site by placing all of the parking on top of a single floor of boutique retail shops. Our goal for the project has been to provide a pedestrian-driven shopping center with an outdoor sidewalk bustling with window-shoppers, café seating, and lush landscaping. An existing office building on the site was the former headquarters for Nestle, and is now home to several private and government offices. The new parking garage will serve the offices as well as new retail shops. The Common Council of White Plains approved the project unanimously!
Stay tuned for updates. We’re working on the retail marketing campaign now, and construction will start soon.
Do People Actually Shop in Stores?
(Part 2 in a series – Magic Beans)
The use of mobile devices to make purchases is still a small fraction of the total sales in the e-commerce world. But it’s rising. Per the New York Times, “last year, people spent $25 billion on purchases made from phones and tablets,” and that’s an increase of 81 percent over the previous year. I was curious how that affected my retail clients, so I reached out to them. This post is the second in a short series of responses. My questions were: how does mobile spending affect your retail business? What about show-rooming? How do you either fight it or work with it…
Sustainability at KIPP Academy Lynn
Earth month seems like a good point to reflect on the recently completed and now fully occupied KIPP Academy Lynn project in Lynn, MA. Part of the challenge associated with designing this project was making the school comfortable during the warmer months without the luxury of having a budget that could support full air conditioning. While oftentimes this problem is lamented, we saw it as an opportunity to be creative with the building systems and fenestration to provide low-energy, passive, and (most importantly) low-first cost climate control…