 All right, everybody. Welcome. Let's get started. So it's my pleasure tonight to introduce our guest speaker. David Hasin is the founding principal and creative director of Hasin Plus Associates, which is a multidisciplinary architecture and design firm, which has received regional, national, international recognition for a really broad portfolio of architecture, interior design, graphics, and branding. David received his bachelor of arts in architecture from Princeton and a master in architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. And he currently serves on the Northeastern University School of Architecture advisory board and regularly serves as guest critic at design schools across the country. These include Harvard GSD, the MIT School of Architecture, University of Virginia, and this semester, Hasin Plus Associates is a visiting firm in residence at our school. When he was introducing the studio topic to our students this semester, David mentioned that he was born in Switzerland and that the students should be warned that he's quite meticulous. I would say this is certainly evident in the work of his office, which is characterized by a real love for the craft of making buildings. And I'd invite you all to visit the really excellent exhibition, Now on View in the Gallery, which celebrates 25 years of their office's work. Another salient quality in the work, which is reflected in the name of their studio offering this semester titled, Revisioning Heritage, Contemporary Interventions in Historic City, is a real embrace for the existing context in which the projects reside. David's an active civic and professional organization, and he's served on numerous boards and juries in Boston and across the country. He's currently a member of Boston's Civic Design Commission, which is the city of Boston's design review panel for significant projects that impact the public realm. David's also active in a number of charities and non-profit organizations, which focus on strengthening the connection between arts and community. In 2010, David was named a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, which is a great honor eight years ago. So please join me in welcoming David Hasin. Well, thank you very much for that very kind introduction, and it's a real pleasure to be here with all of you today. I, in particular, want to thank Stephen White for bringing us to Roger Williams and inviting us to be here. It's been a real pleasure so far. I just came off four hours, I think, of desk grits with all of our students and really excited about what I saw. I also want to thank the HNA team that is a firm in residence teaching opportunity, and I want to thank the whole HNA team that's teaching with me this semester, including Scott Thompson, Matthew Mankey, Michelangelo Latona, and your very own alumni, Josh Lentz. And I also, the exhibit went up today, and I want to thank all the folks here at Roger Williams and some of the work study students and so forth who helped pull that together. I know that's a lot of work, and I really appreciate it. So I promise to make sure that everyone gets to see the Red Sox tonight, so we'll move it along. A little closer to the mic, OK. There we go. Before I get started, I just wanted to say a few words about the exhibit and our 25th anniversary, which we celebrate in the exhibit next door. I just got back from a recent trip to Europe, which I'm fortunate to go to frequently because my parents are there. And I'm always reminded when I'm there of the large role that architects and architecture plays in Europe in the cultural development of Europe and in the civic development of the cities and so forth in Europe, much larger really than here. And I know this firsthand because my father was an architect in Switzerland, and I learned the practice initially from him. And I could see how the role that architecture played firsthand in that society. So in thinking about celebrating our 25th anniversary, I really wanted to frame the work that we did in the context of lessons and observations that we had learned over the last 25 years. In the spirit of helping designers and architects actually be more effective here, be more effective communicators, be more engaged, help propel our profession to a point where we have a similar ability and power in our society to make change. And in particular for people that practice in small and mid-sized firms, which is from what I understand what most architects aspire to do, and small and mid-sized firms are very much under threat in this country right now by the merger and acquisition of many firms. And so it's more important than ever that people who are practicing in small and mid-sized firms really can be as effective as possible in their practice. So really the spirit of the exhibit is about trying to create a profession that engages more directly with the community. And while design is key, of course, so is this idea of communication engagement. And my students here will already know that I believe that what you have to say and is very important, but how you say it and how you communicate it and how you can be clear about what it is that you want to accomplish is almost more important. So because ultimately I believe that I don't want architecture to be an insider's game that has its own language, but that we have a responsibility as architects and designers to educate the public and our clients in why design matters, which is one of the reasons why we publish our own magazine and a copy of which you see right here. So while I hope you enjoy the entire exhibit, there are a few of the ideas, few of the 25 ideas that I'll be touching on today. One of the ideas is integrated practice, which is something that is part of our design practice. We have architecture interior design and graphic design, which follows up on this idea of designing everything. That design doesn't have limitations. That when you approach a project, you can design all of it. Second idea is that practice has a lot of constraints, a lot of constituencies, a lot of technical difficulties. So expertise is very important. You can learn a lot about expertise, but really a good architect can pivot. They can work with the problems that they have, adapt their ideas, and make change in that way. And we'll illustrate that with some of the projects that we're going to show you. Third, having a strong concept that you can articulate and that people can understand is central to being an effective communicator. And something that I'm going to touch on as one of the main topics of our talk today, which is about embracing the heritage of the sites that we work in, the cities that we work in, the people that we work with, and the power that architecture has to connect to people by connecting to that aspect of heritage. So that brings us to the title of the lecture itself, which is Re-Envisioning Heritage, History as a Tool of Invention. Cities are more dynamic than ever. Most of you are likely going to be practicing in one of the large cities somewhere in the United States. Boston is an example of a historic city that is in rapid transition and undergoing major change. What does it mean to build in a historic city? What is the responsibility that that has? What are the opportunities that we have as architects to work in these very charged environments? And what is it ultimately that we're trying to build? Are we building something global and anonymous? Are we trying to build something very particular to the city, to the culture? And if so, how do we do that? And what are the ways that allow us to practice in a way that would be particularly effective in that context? So I'm going to start with a book that I was very interested in when I was a child, which was H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. It's the story of H.G. Wells, actually a scientist and inventor that constructs a machine in his Victorian home that allows him to travel forward and backward, but in that one place, the machine, he doesn't travel everywhere, he travels in that place. And he travels ultimately 800,000 years into the future and discovers a society that has changed completely from what he knows. I really was fascinated by the book because, oops, it is a jumpy clicker. I was really fascinated by the book and actually only a few years ago saw the 1960 movie, which has been made like three times in two TV shows and all kinds of things. But it was a particularly fascinating view because I've always been interested in standing in a place in a city and imagining what it was like years before or what imagining what it could be years from now. And H.G. Wells writes that, face this world, learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end, you will find clues in it all. It means really that you should be hyper-observant and really do research and really understand the place that you are to find clues and to find meaning that could ultimately inform your understanding of a place. And I find that particularly important in architecture. And our studio has just recently come back from Montreal where we did a field trip where it was about going to another city, going to another place, really trying to immerse yourself very quickly in that culture, trying to understand what makes the city tick, what is its DNA, how can whatever it is that you all propose for these sites be meaningful to that place and be particular to that place. And that only comes with the hard work of research and understanding. So I'm gonna contextualize that a little bit with my own experience, our own practice. And the story starts a little bit like GSD graduate moves to up and coming neighborhood in Boston, starts practice, has studied architectural history but knows very little about where he's living or the history of the place that he has moved to. And in this particular case, it was the south end of Boston, an area that was undergoing rapid gentrification and change. And I moved on to a beautiful street called Union Park that had been recently used in a movie called The Bostonians, which is a Henry James novel about Boston's progressive political history. It's about the suffragettes and breaking out of the bounds of traditional Boston and progressive thinking, which was really interesting because it dovetailed with the neighborhood's identity at that time, which was of a really sort of progressive neighborhood, a lot of change, a lot of different communities mixing together. And one of the projects that we undertook as a community was to restore the park that was at the center of Union Park. And all we had were the historic photographs that you see here of the fountains and the fences, and we had to reconstruct almost time machine style, going back into time to imagine what that place looked like in the 1860s when it was developed to create an accurate restoration of that park. And as a graduate of an architecture program where I'd been mostly working with very modern ideas about contemporary architecture, this was a completely foreign experience to me. I had not really done anything like that. I was expecting to graduate and be working on modern buildings, and suddenly I'm like pouring through old photographs. And as our practice started, one of the very first commissions that I got was a falling down building. You can see it on the lower left hand image. This kind of broken down building, which people told us was a historic site, and that was one of the oldest buildings in Boston and that needed to be restored and preserved. And I knew nothing of historic preservation. I didn't know anything about what the history of Boston was or any of that. The building was a wreck, it had few clues. So as a young practice, we started pouring through the history books, we went to the Boston Athenaeum, and eventually found this painting, which you see a picture of in the upper left hand corner, that actually showed the porter houses as one of the first buildings being built in Boston on the neck. And we could start to see the detail and the window patterns and so forth. And we used, that was the only thing we had, really, was to reconstruct the building that ultimately got restored. And it was a really interesting experience for me as an architect because we were engaged with the community, with the Landmarks Commission, with all kinds of people that I was not expecting to work with, but ended up becoming a very important part of our practice going forward. And the building ultimately built became a symbol of rebirth for this neighborhood. Over the subsequent 20 years after that was completed, a big development wave swept along Washington Street in Boston, as gentrification moved from the back bay to south bay and into the industrial areas, the formerly industrial areas of south of Washington Street, for those of you who know that area. And I learned very quickly that building in this area meant that we needed to understand the history of the neighborhood, how it had evolved, and to be able to communicate our projects to all the stakeholders in a context, a cultural context, that they understood. And that was one of the lessons that the Porter House taught us. What we learned was that the city that I thought I understood was actually we were inhabiting this very narrow isthmus of land which had originally connected Boston back to Roxbury and that had formed the Washington Street, formed the major connector and was the major civic gateway between Boston and actually the rest of the country, Boston Harbor and the rest of the country. So understanding how the city's geography and structure had actually changed over time became really interesting and very foundational to our thinking about how the neighborhood could evolve. What felt like a backwater had actually been once the central artery of the city. These photographs begin to sort of talk about like that evolution. So on the upper left in 1805, you see the map of the neck. In 1873, you see how landfill is being brought in to build the back bay and south end neighborhoods. By the 1900s, the neighborhood had become an immigrant neighborhood, very industrial, had completely changed its character. In the 1950s, they had put an L down Washington Street and you see Holy Cross Cathedral, which was the central gathering place for the Roman Catholic community in Boston, which was a very immigrant based community. The L was actually located there by the Protestants in Boston as a kind of snub to the Catholics after they had built this magnificent cathedral. And that led to the decline of the neighborhood through the 70s and 80s. And we found ourselves in the 80s and 90s once the L had been taken down involved in the rebirth of this neighborhood. And what you see is one of our projects, one of our early projects, Laconia Lofts on the upper right. And what's really important about this sort of timeline is that I am very aware that this timeline is going to continue. And hundreds of years from now, there will be many other slides that this will only be a small part of, which is part of the understanding of history and your place in it. So many of the projects that we built in this area there were certain clues that were obvious. The neighborhood had primarily been built out of red brick. There was a certain scale and height to the buildings. But in some of the first projects that we built, we were looking for other ideas that we could express through contemporary architecture that would begin to hint at this evolution, this historic sequence that happened in the neighborhood. So for example, in the Laconia Lofts project, that tower became emblematic of the towers of the piano factory buildings that had traditionally been built in this area. The building to the below it is the East Berkeley Lofts building where we became really interested in the warehouse buildings that had been built in the large scale windows and large scale loft spaces that had been created for those buildings and how those could become interesting new residential types for building in that area, building some of the first new lofts in Boston. And the project place building, which is on the upper right, which through research we found out was actually being built on the site of the original city gate of Boston and was now being built as a homeless, transitional housing for homeless, which became a kind of a gateway of a different kind. And we found a lot of very powerful symbolism in the notion that this gateway was now a different kind of gateway. And even in the competition that was launched for that project in which we were competing against developers who wanted to build luxury housing, the community actually embraced housing for homeless over luxury housing in part because they found our story and our understanding of the neighborhood so compelling that they felt it belonged to them and to their neighborhood in a way that the other projects did not. And that was a really fascinating lesson for me anyway. Taking that idea as our practice expanded, taking that idea into other neighborhoods, we were building in the back bay and in Beacon Hill and in Fort Point. And we took a lot of these same lessons both into those neighborhoods and then ultimately beyond into projects that we built not just in Boston but elsewhere in the country. So with the historic city as context, I'm gonna focus on four projects that illustrate how these ideas shaped our design process in our firm. And they range from a large-scale multifamily, multi-unit residential project to a multifamily project, to a single family project, to actually a retail project, so all scales. And how this idea about understanding the place started to inform all of that work. So FP3, so FP3 was a very important commission for us. It was a big project. It had enormous technical challenges. We were building three restaurants for a world-renowned chef named Barbara Lynch. It was a new neighborhood. It had a very activist community. It was on a prominent site. It was downtown. I have to say that for me, this was scary. We had been practicing in the neighborhoods and suddenly we were working in this very prominent location on a very challenging project. But we started in the same way. We looked at the history of the area. We had an infill building that had been removed that we researched to find out more about its history. We learned about how the neighborhood had been built for one company by two architects over a relatively short period of time. And that helped us understand the nature of the architecture that we were working with. We also started working on the enormous technical challenges that were associated with renovating these large warehouse buildings. We wanted to add three additional stories on top of the building, which meant essentially threading a new structure through the old building to build a new building practically on stilts on top of the old building while still providing seismic upgrades and creating a bathtub of waterproofing into the harbor to protect these very expensive kitchens of this restaurant. It was an enormous technical challenge and in fact it was such an interesting challenge that the Boston Globe did these diagrams to explain to the rest of the community what was going on with these buildings and how much work was involved in preserving them and building new with them. You in the middle you see the excavation that we carved out the inside of the building to provide new cores and seismic stability through the center of the building and then on the right the pattern of the existing foundations and the sort of web of new piles that had to be dropped down through the existing system of piles. It was a very complicated project with lots of technical challenges. We also had a very sensitive community response because the neighborhood had a look and feel that had strong cornice lines and very continuous facades and it became very important to understand where you were gonna see the building and the addition and where you were not. And so Scott, Matthew and others in the office developed this really into sort of like a reverse shadow of the visibility of the building into the surrounding neighborhood which is what you see in those diagrams on the left which allowed us to sort of pick our moments of where you could really see the addition and the contrast between the new and the old architecture and the view corridors like that you see on the bottom that we wanted to preserve without interrupting the continuous cornice line. So we used all of these different techniques to convince the community that the impact of this project was going to be very thoughtful and very considered. The facade design itself, we didn't wanna mimic the old facades. We instead decided to use materials that were consistent with the character of the neighborhood pre-patinated copper metal and use the new forms to engage and connect to the original buildings. And in the slide on the right, I think you can really see how the three additional floors were added on the top. There's the infill brick building and the elements of the building are literally slipping over and engaging with the old building. We were of course concerned about sustainability and one of the things that was really interesting about excavating all of the central core of the building was we were able to harvest a lot of the beams that were taken out of the building. We sent them up to a mill in Maine and we had those remilled and brought back in order to create the new lobby and gallery for the building. The area had been, an artist's area still is an artist's area, the artist felt very much under siege and one of the things that we decided to do with our project was actually incorporate a new artist's gallery into the space and that's what you see actually to the right on this image here. Getting into something that foretold projects that we would do later on, we also got engaged with the marketing of the building. It's, we weren't just the architects, we actually started to assist with telling the story of the building through marketing. Our interiors group became involved and started to develop the model units and in the model units we were using pallets of materials that actually reinforced the materials that we were using on the exterior of the building so we were able to tell one story both with interiors and with architecture and with marketing. The building opened into the depths of the recession so we worked with Boston Magazine to develop a concept home in one of the units where we started to engage with creative companies in the district, graphic designers and interesting suppliers of furniture and crafts people to create this highly conceptual unit to attract attention to the building which was one of our first projects where we really started to work with other creative companies outside of our own which became something that became important to us. So in the end, the project became a new marker for the neighborhood. I feel really spoke to the authentic history of Boston in that area and today as you see the Seaport District which has developed just a few blocks away, I think that have been criticized for being very anonymous and this project feels more relevant than ever to me about building a new building in a district that speaks to the character and history of the neighborhood that it was in. This next project is 451 Marlboro and it was in a collaboration with one of our longtime general contractors and who themselves are architects as well and it was really a once in a lifetime opportunity to build in one of the country's greatest architectural districts, the Back Bay. There are really only two or three sites remaining in the Back Bay and this was one of those sites and I love the slide on the right because so many architects of great quality contributed so much to creating this district and here was an opportunity as you see on the lower left to infill one of the last missing teeth in the 21st century in that special place. We again started with the history. What was the history of this district? How did it develop? The block was an unusual block. It was one of the few rectangular blocks in the district that had different frontages than other blocks. We researched the Back Bay homes that had been built in that area. What made them special? What was the character of those homes? One example of that was Delft Tile was a material that was used to show worldliness by those people who built in the 1860s that they could afford and have the sophistication to import materials from Europe. And then of course there was the problem of the infill itself trying to be able to pack as much development frankly onto the site as could be done. And you see on the right hand side the scale of the townhouses on the left hand side, the scale of the Charles Gate building which was a much taller building on the left hand side and how we were sort of mitigating between those two scales. We did many, many studies. And as I was talking about with some of the students today, you know, your first facade drawing is not the facade drawing that is going to be actually built. There's so much subtlety and so much craft and so much thoughtfulness that goes into making a good facade. So the team, Matthew Mankey and others really worked to look at the context and really think about how a building could step up and back to create a sensitive infill in this district. We looked at the history of the block itself and got clues about the ideas of creating bays and individual entrances and masses that weren't all the same or repetitive that created a kind of collage. And in the final result, the materiality and character of the building, again, working with the materials that were characteristic of the neighborhood, the red brick, the cast stone, the granite, but really looking at it in a contemporary way, trying to figure out what the DNA of the neighborhood was and how that could be expressed in modern terms. The front of the building and the back of the building, actually one of the really interesting things about the back bay is a lot of the buildings are very articulate on the front and you go onto the back and they have a kind of much more stripped, almost modern character and we brought that into our composition as well where the back of the building actually has a kind of a sort of a more robust muscular expression of the massing, whereas the front has much more delicate detail consistent with other buildings in the district. And then what were we gonna do with the historic story? How were we gonna tell that story? Well, one of the graphic designers in the office found this view of Boston from 1848 by an English artist. What we really liked about the lithograph was not just that it was a beautiful lithograph, but that the intention of the artist was to portray Boston as a great city and it was an aspirational lithograph and at the time that the back bay was being filled. So what did we do with it? Well, we worked with 21st century technology with Artaic, a mosaic fabricator. We brought in the colors of the delft tile that had been characteristic of back bay homes and created this lobby mural in the building which speaks to the history of the neighborhood in a completely modern way and gave everyone who lives there a sense of the fact that even though they were living in a modern building they were connected to this much larger history of this important neighborhood. We also brought a lot of that logic into the design of the typical units. Again, using things like oak floors which were classic New England floors, stones that had been brought that came from New England, black windows, but in this case, black steel windows rather than black painted wood windows, all trying to give a foundation to what we wanted to be a completely contemporary and modern design. We had this amazing opportunity to design the penthouse as well and the penthouse project is really something I'm very proud of in terms of how all the disciplines came together and you really can see the black steel windows, the oak floors, the contemporary staircase and the view of the red brick townhouses that surround it through these windows. So this very cool palette with this very red city that comes through those windows. This is a shot looking across that staircase into the living room of the apartment. Again, where you can sort of see the traditional back bay beyond the windows in a completely different way than you normally experience it. And I particularly, one of the women in my office is also her husband is an art dealer and so that painting that you see above the fireplace is done by a craftsman who works in smoke. Smoke is his art form. So if you think about this painting of a landscape done in smoke on a fireplace that is, you know, the back bay was a smoky place, that was sort of part of this idea of really emphasizing craft at every level, both in the architecture, in the interiors, in the artwork and in how it all came together. The light fixture that hangs above the staircase was our take on the sort of central chandeliers that normally inhabited these great spaces that used to be on the parlor level, now the most desirable level is the penthouse level and so we designed this light curtain with these New York lighting artists that created a different kind of identity for the building and I'll come back to that in a minute, but our branding group and graphic design group then was able to tell that whole story in putting all of the materials together to both identify the building, tell the story of the delftile, talk about our attitude towards, you know, as we talk about it, historic details, a modern spin, be able to tell the story from beginning to end and here at the end, you see this slide, that's the light curtain that you see in the penthouse unit on the left-hand slide, the idea that this modern building is rooted in history as told in just a number of ways. Moving to a much more residential scale, we did a townhouse on Boston Common on Beacon Street. One of the most historic streets in Boston, you know, Boston, you're dealing with history everywhere, you know, everywhere you turn around, you're dealing with it in one form or another. We found out there's Teddy Roosevelt walking out of their house. It was a facade that was an important facade on the Common, untouchable. The Beacon Hill District architectural guidelines are extraordinarily strict and as architects that graduate when you go working in some of these neighborhoods, you will be quite amazed by what you can and cannot do down to the color of the door or the hardware on the door. So rather than try to alter the exterior of this building in any way, we did a faithful restoration of the facade and decided that on this project, our focus would be inside. And on the inside of this project, again, we wanted to make this connection between the history of the building and the life of a contemporary family. So you see the traditional door with the fan window. Normally there would have been a vestibule there. You see the stone that we brought through the floor that rolls up the wall and the idea of these hopes windows which slid back and forth to create a vestibule for winter but more space for the family in the rest of the season. The house had a traditional Boston plan, very limited window frontage on the front, very long and thin party walls to the back with an L. The house was vertical. It was six stories tall for a family with lots of kids and a dog that was too old to go up the stairs. And I mean, it was like, it was a crazy thing to try and make a house like this a modern house. You see it in reverse in this view as well with the garage in the back and the stepping of the floor plans. So one of the challenges there was circulation, like how do you make a house like this work? The circulation had been cut up over centuries. There were stairs that went up one floor and didn't continue up and it was a real kind of mess of circulation. So we decided to really take this old and new contrast to heart, restore the spiral staircase that you see in green at the front of the house, introduce a new modern staircase in the back of the house and an elevator to thread all the way up through the house to make it suitable for aging in place. And this is one of the big challenges of working with these houses is how you thread elevators and new technology through some of these very complex houses. And so here you see the results of that effort. A skylight at the top of the staircase was introduced for the traditional staircase and these light slots that we created all the way down to bring some light into the center of the house. And then in the back, a new staircase that really connected the public areas of the house so that you could get to the garage and get to the kitchen and move easily back and forth through the house. Which brings the issue of the kitchen. In all of these houses, the kitchen is a huge issue. Like where are they? The kitchens are in the basement. Families don't live that way anymore. Like how do you modernize these houses? How do you bring kitchens up onto levels that were very formal and traditional? So what we did was, this is a sort of a picture of what the traditional back bay house, how it worked. There was an upstairs downstairs quality to it. The servants were in the basement in these kind of grim spaces. Very formal dining rooms up above. Well, now families don't live this way. People use the kitchen, they live in the kitchen. Formal dining is really a thing of the past. Do you even need a dining room? Do you want to give over so much square footage of your home to a dining room when you could have a family room or a media room or an office? So this was the result of that process. We actually brought the kitchen up, turned it into a living room, dining room space. The kitchen island has this custom table that slides out and moves into the other room and can be expanded for 12 people for Thanksgiving. But the rest of the time, it is one space that is up at the main level and the family lives here all the time. So this was the kind of modification that we were making to a traditional house to sort of modernize it for 21st century living. And that the same holds true with bathrooms. Bathrooms were these kind of dingy spaces and now we worked to bring a lot of light and to use a lot of the same mill work that we were using throughout the house bringing actually furniture into the bathrooms, really creating a kind of a much more appealing place for the family. The interiors team kicked in to gear on this one as well and using a lot of sort of traditional fabrics embedded in ultimately contemporary, without contemporary furniture and contemporary cabinetry, constantly trying to make that connection between the history of the house and the history of the place and the fact that it was now designed for 21st century living. And I like this picture because this is now the living room. It's not a sitting room that no one goes into or a dining room that no one uses. It was actually the dining room at one point. It's actually the room that looks out over the Boston Common. It has the family's traditional artwork. You see the beautiful fireplace that we preserved on the right hand side and the piano. But ultimately this blending of old and new is the idea of a modern Boston grand Boston home for today. Which brings me to the last project which is a completely different kind of project which started with all three disciplines of our office. You know, Nate said we have a very varied practice, we do. We do restaurants and retail and offices and all kinds of things. I've been focusing on some of the residential projects. But this was a very, very different problem. The program was a three meal restaurant in the Kendall Square technology area. It wanted to be breakfast, lunch and dinner. Wanted to be a meeting space, a bar space. A place that would work literally from seven in the morning to midnight and act as a kind of cultural and community anchor in an area that was a very anonymous workplace space. What we were given was this, right? This was about as anonymous a box as you can possibly imagine. And we came into this space and it's kind of like, well, where do you even begin with something like this? Like we were charged with the brand, the logo, the name, the identity, all aspects of the project. There it is. What do you do? Well, we went back to our same method. We looked at the neighborhood in the context and one of the things that struck us immediately was that it was a neighborhood of glass. Every building was glass. It was like this, like green glass neighborhood. Little antiseptic in some ways, but it was definitely the identity of that place. But we also did our historic research and actually found out surprisingly that Cambridge had been the center of glassmaking for almost a century. And that the roots of the technology, the Polaroid lenses and magnifying glasses and all of those things that we associate with research and technology had their foundation in the glassmaking industry that was making conventional glassware and plates. And that that's in a part why this technology area had evolved to be what it was. So this idea that glass was both the identity of the neighborhood as a modern neighborhood in context, in materiality, but also in heritage was fascinating to us. So we pulled those ideas together. That's Cambridge glass actually on the left hand side. You see the Oculus and magnifying glasses and lenses and the city and the iPhone screens and so forth on the right. And basically made the case to the client that this is an idea. This is a way to tell a story about this place that is relevant both to the people who are working there today and give it some connection back to Cambridge's history more broadly. That it's about glassmaking, it's about high tech, it's discovery, it's exploration, it's invention. It's seen and being seen and they got really excited about it. Hence the idea of glass house. In planning the space, thinking about the breakfast, lunch and dinner and all of that, we really designed it as a series of rooms in this big open space that could literally meet the needs. The raw bar actually became a breakfast bar. The bar was put out front because it was the most active and would draw people in. We had casual dining, a dining room which is the glass house which actually they could close down for meetings for the high tech companies. And so we really worked hard to zone this restaurant in that way. And also really considered the exterior of the building because it fronted out onto this terrace. So we wanted the building to literally move through the glass facade and engage with the terraces that were outside and provide this space, really use glass as this kind of transitional impermeable layer that would allow the restaurant and the life of the restaurant to spill out into the plaza. This is an image of the glass house if you will. That's what we call the meeting room that is in the center space. And the image in the back is, there's a funny story about the image in the back. We had found this image of this Mad Men era guy looking through binoculars optimistically at the future. And we really loved the idea as a sort of an emblem for the restaurant. But we couldn't use the image because it was copyrighted, we couldn't use the image. So we recreated it actually and that's my nephew who works in high tech in Boston. And we created this image of him as a kind of way of telling the story of the building, of the build out very graphically as a focal point in the restaurant itself. And we carried that through to all the details. So the furniture, the colors, the materials, the floors were even designed to look like shards of glass. The fixtures were glass. The idea of the patinated copper, the green patinated copper was, it was all about unifying around this theme. And here you see more images of the different seating areas. And then the glass itself of the room, we engaged with local leaded glass makers to create new stained glass that picked up on this shards of glass idea. It's this notion that when you're working in all of these disciplines, you can bring all of these ideas together to tell a really strong story. And ultimately we were even designing the menus and as I said, the logo. So all of that kind of came through. The models were actually came from the office where the interior designers who were working in the office. You know, it's a technology area and any of you who've been to a restaurant know that and tonight it'll be no different. That you come into a restaurant, it's beautifully designed, there's nothing but TV sets. It's a really disruptive how technology interacts with restaurant decor. This was an opportunity here. We built this structure to house the glasses and the bottles and the TVs that are double-sided so that no matter where you're sitting on this bar, you can still watch the game. And, but it's not a tacked on thing. It's something that's integrated into the design of the restaurant. And you know, sense of humor helps as well. These are the bathrooms. This is Rebecca, one of the interior designers who's looking into the men's room. And, you know, this idea again that you're giving, that there's, that humor is another way that we can communicate and, you know, tell a story about this idea of the lenses, the technologies, the binoculars, the invention of this area. So, those are four projects. And the title of the lecture was, you know, History as a Tool of Invention. Well, history is just one tool of invention. Obviously, we have many. There's technology. There's issues of sustainability. There's issues of fabrication. There are all kinds of tools that we use to design the buildings and to design the spaces that we're all hoping to build. But I find the history and research are particularly key in part because understanding the history allows us to tell stories and narratives to the audiences of people that are going to be using our spaces that is not an insider's language, but is something that can be conveyed and becomes part of their ability to relate to and connect to the projects that you build. You know, I was listening this morning to CNN and they actually had a story about architecture, which was quite amazing. Elizabeth Diller of Diller and Scaffidia was talking about the Royal Institute of British Architects Award that is being debated right now. And there are four finalist projects and she was making the point, which was really encouraging to hear that they specifically chose projects that were connected to the community in a very, very direct way rather than projects that were, you know, sort of traditional stark attack projects. They were looking for projects that had meaning in the communities that they were built in. And, you know, unfortunately, none of the four projects were in the United States, but I really responded to what she was talking about and how she was talking about each of the four projects that had been nominated. And I suggest, you know, looking at them. So as a way of concluding this, I wanna come back to the time machine idea and, you know, even ask like, where will these four projects be in 100 years? You know, FP3 might be underwater, frankly. 60 Beacon is probably gonna have three or four families that are gonna live in it, between now and then and change it, you know, again and again. Glasshouse is a restaurant. So when you design retail and restaurants, you have to get really used to the excitement of building them and opening them. And then if you live long enough, seeing them close and shut down and something new get built in its place. 451 Marlboro was a special project, I think, for me, because the context suggested that we were really building for the long haul there and that someday that building would just sort of slip into the character of that really beautiful neighborhood. And just like all of the other buildings, no one will know that we designed it, but they'll know that it's a part of our, this very, very strong heritage of architecture and they'll feel that it belongs there. And that is really powerful because to me, ultimately, the lesson of history is humility. As architects, you know, there's a lot of ego in our profession, but the work that we do is very temporal. And what I liked about the whole time machine idea was that it's making that point that history goes on and that the work that we're gonna do today and that you'll do when you graduate is just part of a much larger story. And it's really helpful to think instead of your ego and the statement that you wanna make, to think about what you're designing is really relevant to society today or will retain its relevance as the years go by. What are the buildings that are going to be kept? What are the buildings that are gonna be torn down and replaced and why? I don't think of architecture as a disposable, a lot of architecture that's being built right now looks very disposable to me and I don't think of architecture as a disposable art. I think of it as something much more important. And fundamentally, I believe if we approach design in this way by using the cultural context and by thinking about the place that it has in our community, that we have a much better chance as architects of connecting our work to the communities that we build in and making the broader public appreciate and understand what we do. So at the end of the day, the interesting thing about H.G. Wells is that in the Time Machine project, I mean the Time Machine story, he goes to the future and it's a difficult future. And he actually has to flee, he has to escape. And he finds his time machine and he escapes and he goes back to the Victorian era where he was and he didn't get the timing quite right so he arrives three hours later than the dinner that he left from when he started the journey. And everything, the people sitting around the table and everything is theoretically exactly the same but he's a changed man. He's a changed man because he saw the future, he thought about the future, he thought about his role in this much larger sort of trajectory of history and he leaves the dinner and goes back to the Time Machine and decides to go to the future and actually ends up there armed with the history, with the knowledge of the history that he has to make a better world in that future. And so I'm gonna end it there. So thank you. And I'm happy to take questions and answers. So I mean, well, answers, questions, please provide questions and answers. So, and I guess I have to stand behind this microphone so I'll stay back here. Oh, come on, don't be shy. Yes, sir. A very design question about the classroom. Yes. In the restaurant, it seems that there's a lot of hard services up in the bank and in the bar schools and was it a younger demographic in the shoes that you consider that like your team the acoustics of this restaurant? Yeah, it's a, you know, it's an excellent question. It's a noisy space, there's no question. The client wanted a pretty noisy, active space. The way that we sort of solved it was in the coffering and the ceilings, we created a pretty heavily coffered ceiling that had a lot of acoustic materials to sort of trap the sound as it rose up in the space. And a lot of the ceilings were open and sprayed with K-13. So there was a lot, so we were really relying on the ceilings to do a lot of the sound absorption. That being said, and the drapery to some extent, that being said, it's a noisy space. But it was part of the discussion and the client wanted, they were nervous about how successful or not this was gonna be and they wanted it to feel hustle bustle even if there weren't that many people in it. Well, it turns out it's a huge success and the place is a little cacophonous. But it's a good question because I think that that has to be really considered, you know, like who is your audience? Now, one of the things about the Kendall Square area is that the audience is largely 25 to 35 and acoustics don't seem to be that big of an issue. For me, it would have been a bigger issue, but that's how we dealt with that. So it was a consideration, thanks. Somebody else? Yes, sir. How beneficial is it for you and the firm and also the architecture you can create to be so close to these projects and how do you approach the same process differently for projects that you can't just walk down the street to to take pictures of and to run back to office to tackle these projects. You know, so the question is how, you know, so much of our work is so close and so local that gives us a real familiarity with it and how do you address it when it's further away? You know, we're doing a project in Wyoming right now. We're doing, it's a very different, we've done projects all over the place. You know, part of it is like a deep dive early on and sometimes I do think that, you know, we worked with shop on a competition for a tower in downtown Boston a year or two ago. That's in the exhibit. And what I found really interesting was their process was actually kind of similar in that they came to Boston and they, like, looked at the city through their lens and looked at it very critically and the things that they pulled as being sort of typically Boston were not the things that were obvious to me because I lived there. And so they were drawing on things like the color and they were really interested in the terracotta buildings that had been built in Boston rather than the brick buildings that everybody associates with Boston. So sometimes there's a real freshness in going to another city and looking at it without all the baggage of knowing the city and the people and everything inside and out. And it's hard to, it's a trick actually as you practice for a long time in a place to, you know, keep that fresh outlook and not fall into standard responses. So that's one aspect of it. But I also think that the profession has gotten very global and it's sort of like, you know, you practice, you know, you go sometimes to cities and you see, oh, one of those, they've got one of those and they've got one of those and everybody's got one, you know, every campus has one of those. And it feels a little bit cut and paste. And I think that I'm particularly, you know, maybe it's, I love to travel but I like to travel for inspiration, not for work. And I think that this idea of like regional responses to architecture and architecture practices that are really focused on a region is something that I am very attracted to and that I embrace as part of our practice. It's intentional that we have a New England focus and that we believe that, you know, thinking globally and acting locally is really a very essential part of the practice. Oh, come on, get at least one more. No, I've left you all speechless. Oh, wait, good, thank you. It's very interesting, you have a magazine in your office, who puts that together and who are the people that read it? So, good question. So the magazine, so the magazine was, I hired a very talented graphic designer a few years ago and, you know, being a graphic designer in an architecture firm can be a bit of a drag. You can be doing like signage and proposal covers and things like that and I had much greater aspirations for her and so we talked about ways to really showcase that aspect of our practice and I really, frankly, I personally am interested in all kinds of design. I'm interested in interior design. I'm interested in graphic design. I'm interested in industrial design. So it was sort of a fun thing for me as well but we landed on this idea that, you know, we're always trying to get projects published and you're working with writers and they don't quite get it right and they don't really tell the story the way you wanna tell the story and so that became part of the impetus was to be able to talk about our projects in the way that we, to tell our story our way and the other thing was that, this gets to this issue of communicating ideas about architecture and design to the broader community. Architects have this sort of bad tendency to show photographs of buildings with no one in them on websites that feel very anonymous and kind of almost alienating and they don't really engage with the people and the public in ways that I think could be much more effective. So the magazine was really not about creating a portfolio piece like, you know, here's pictures of our project. It was really about saying, who's working on the project? Who are they? Who are our clients? Why are they doing this project? Who are the artisans that we're working with? What's their story? So it was really intended to be more about the people behind the scenes that are making the architecture and the collaboration and what they're thinking about, what they're reading, what we're all thinking about as a studio, the 25 people in our studio, like our interesting people, like what are we doing? And the response has been phenomenal. So it's a limited, we have a few here. It's, the exhibit is basically based on the magazine so you'll see that if you see the exhibit. The idea was really to send it mostly to our clients and to connect the work that we do to our clients and in a way promote ourselves certainly in that way, but also promote our vendors and all of that. Last year was a finalist for Interior Design's graph, the best graphic design project in the country. And last year we also, like if you think about all the affinity magazines that are published, you know, Delta Airlines and BMW and all of these things, we beat them all in our, with our little three man show back in Boston. And it's been really a fun project, I think, for everyone in the office to be able to create a forum for connecting our design and our design ideas to the broader public and it's not intended for academic audiences or other architects. It's really intended to communicate with the people that we want to engage with. Architects are so obsessed with communicating with other architects and I would like us to try and connect more with the broader public. And this magazine is one way that we've found to do it. Yes. You mentioned how you look at the historical context when you design, you look at things regionally, then I know some projects are more based around the street and then the neighborhood and then before you mentioned doing good as a whole. I would just like to get some sort of insight in how you know what scale to look at historical context at when developing a project. Well, you know, that's a really good question. I think that the scale, you know, how to look at regional context of what scale. I must say that, you know, regionally materiality becomes I think a very important thing. I'm always like today where I was looking at a project and one of the designers in the office found this schist that is quarried in Western Massachusetts. That was really beautiful and I didn't even know we were still quarrying schist in Massachusetts and I became really excited about it because it was an authentic material and I really like when we're working, you know, it doesn't always work, clients don't always want that but I really like at 451 we were really trying to use materials that were at least regional which is by the way of course a goal of sustainability as well so that has a double value. I think when it comes to the building itself though, the immediate context, you know, one of the things that's so interesting about design in Europe is that oftentimes the design of the buildings themselves is very, very obviously contemporary in response to the centuries of architecture that are literally up and down that street but they're very respectful of scale and of the quality of the detail and the materiality. Here we feel, I think sometimes we think that like you can jump scale and you can change materiality and you can do all of that and somehow the anchors back to what is essential about that place become certainly lost to the broader public if not to maybe more professional audiences. So I really do believe that scale, you know, our buildings are not the biggest buildings in town but I'm really grateful that we have built buildings that feel like they fit in to the context and the scale and context and rhythm of the city rather than projects that try so hard to disguise themselves and can't really do it effectively. So there is something nice about operating at the scale that we do. Anyone else? Well, I really appreciate all of you being here and thank you very much. And