Curbed Features: How Boston's Busiest Architects Are Changing Their City

[Rendering of 1 Ink, 2 Ink, and 3 Ink, as seen from the corner of Harrison Avenue and Herald Street. Rendering by Elkus Manfredi Architects.]

At a meeting in early 2007 in the Fort Point, Boston, headquarters of the architecture firm Elkus Manfredi Architects, cofounder and principal Howard Elkus welcomed developer Ori Ron to discuss his residential conversion plans for the old Dainty Dot factory building on the edge of Boston's Chinatown. Ron had with him several different brands of water bottles, from the stumpy plastic of Poland Springs all the way to the cylindrical glass of Voss.

"Let's imagine every water bottle is a building," Ron said. He began placing them on a table between Elkus and himself, careful to end with the Voss bottle. "I want you to build this type of building."

Elkus laughed. "You're challenging me," replied the veteran architect, whose firm had by that point designed dozens of projects in the Greater Boston area and throughout the world. "You know what, I know where you're coming from."

[The new Las Vegas City Hall. Photo by Brian Feinknopf.]

Voss it was. Seven years later, in February 2014, Ron's Hudson Group North America would commence leasing at its building at 120 Kingston, now called Radian Boston. True to its geometric name and that 2007 brainstorm, it was cylindrical and glassyand, for Boston, quite tall: 27 floors of 240 luxury apartments starting at $3,000 a month for studios, with 4,500 square feet of ground-floor retail.

It was the latest debut of the latest project for the most prolific architecture firm in Massachusetts. In 2012, the last year comprehensive data was available, Elkus Manfredi had billings of $37,731,000 for projects in the commonwealth, most of them in the Greater Boston region; the firm also had 66 architects registered with Massachusetts. Both measures placed them far ahead of the next busiest firm, CBT architects, with billings of $32,800,000 and 51 architects in-state.

More than Elkus Manfredi's activity is the scope of that activity: big and often tall. Such scope has placed the firm's work toward the center of the region's raging debate over density and height, particularly in Boston, a city with designs on being a global capital of biotechnology and technology as well as a pioneer of crunchy urban planning that includes miles of bike tracks and acres of pedestrian-friendly squares. It's also a city plagued by a notorious housing shortage, with rents at Manhattan-like highs and sales prices to rival San Francisco's.

Projects such as Radian Boston are meant to alleviate that shortage through fresh supply, which can in turn satiate Boston's demand for housingand, therefore, theoretically, at least, drive down housing costs. But getting such projects built remains a challenge, thanks to often byzantine zoning requirements and a feature seemingly unique to Boston amid America's largest metro areas: unremitting opposition to building high and dense, even in urban cores.

"I will define Elkus' job almost as a mission impossible," Ron said, ticking off the engineering, zoning, and economic challenges of building ambitiously in Boston. "If someone is ever able to building anything of substance under those constraints, he should be applauded and saluted."

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Curbed Features: How Boston's Busiest Architects Are Changing Their City