Design Vault Ep. 28 55 Brighton with Rob Clocker

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;13

Doug Pat (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;15 - 00;00;36;09

Rob Clocker (RC)

This collection of blocks has several landscaped alleys to help connect people from front to back. So having pedestrian connections through the block were an important part of the planning of the project. The project itself is a fairly typical four and five stories of housing overtop of a parking podium kind of housing project, which you see all over the country.

 

But we had hoped to blend it in with the neighborhood, of course, and so had to find ways to tie it together.

 

00;00;36;11 - 00;03;34;04

DP

This is my guest, Rob Clocker. I'll share more about him shortly in this episode from The Design Vault. We highlight Rob's project, 55 Brighton Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. 55 Brighton is a mixed use commercial project that marks the completion of the Packard Crossing housing development in the Allston neighborhood of Boston. The building transforms a once underutilized site that previously housed retail and parking lots.

 

Transform the site into a vibrant and sustainable addition to the community. The architecture pays homage to the area's manufacturing heritage. The design concept reflects the vibrant streetscape patterns and automotive detailing. The building contains nearly 100,000 square feet of finished space, with an additional 70,000 square feet allocated to structured parking. The project reinterprets the rhythms and scale of the surrounding block, while paying homage to the area's automotive heritage.

 

The facade, with its distinctive folded fan like design, draws nostalgic inspiration from the wing tails of iconic 1950s automobiles. This design move prompted by the adjacent historic Packard Manufacturing facility. The brick details tie into the fabric of the neighborhood and add warmth and familiarity. While metal panels at the top floor create a dynamic visual contrast to the brick facade.

 

The complex embraces sustainable design strategies and materials such as low flow fixtures, solar panels and groundwater recharge. Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Hi. Rob Clocker holds a master of architecture degree from MIT and an undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Virginia. Previously a senior associate at Perkins and Will in San Francisco. He's now a vice president and managing principal at Hacin, an award winning interdisciplinary architecture and design firm in Boston.

 

With 30 years of experience and award winning renovation and new construction projects. Rob's worked on buildings from office towers to land ports of entry. During his time in Hacin, he completed the Whitney Hotel in Beacon Hill, The IIDA New England award winning ideas. Cambridge Public Garden Townhouse and 55 Brighton Avenue. He's also managing the ongoing mixed use development at 41 Berkeley Street.

 

As an advocate for stewardship of the built environment, he's spoken on adaptive reuse and sustainable design. Rob is a registered architect, LEED accredited professional and member of the Ipswich Zoning Board of Appeals. So welcome, Rob. It's nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about Hacin Architecture and Design firm in Boston. So where are you guys located in the city?

 

What's the size of the firm? How long have you been around and what type of architectural and design work do you do?

 

00;03;34;07 - 00;04;42;16

RC

Thank you, Doug. It's really great to be here with you. Hacin is, as you mentioned, an interdisciplinary design firm where 35 people we take the word interdisciplinary pretty seriously. We have architects, we have interior designers, we have visual and graphic designers. And we think of that because as a concept driven firm, we like to take the idea of the design all the way from the outside of the architecture to the inside and throughout to the entire experience.

 

The firm is located in the south end of Boston, which is one of Boston's many historic neighborhoods. It was founded 30 years ago by our founding principal. David Hacin started at his dining room table and gradually built up to the 35 people we have today. And all that time has been in the South end. So in some sense, we're a neighborhood architecture firm.

 

In another sense, we think we've learned how to build buildings and do design in places that people love in ways that they recognize. We like to joke that the buildings we build are ones we ourselves are going to have to live with ten, 20, 30 years from now.

 

00;04;42;19 - 00;04;47;03

DP

So you were at Perkins and well, for a little while and then ultimately found Hacin.

 

00;04;47;05 - 00;05;36;12

RC

It's a little bit of a convoluted story but yes, those are the facts. My career trajectory had me moving across the country four times to California and back to Boston, and I did each of those moves twice. But the last time when I was in California, I worked with Perkins and Will, and that experience was quite formative in terms of some of the things we may be talking about today because we were an outgrowth of another local firm in San Francisco, which did a lot of adaptive reuse work.

 

And in that role, I was able to learn surprisingly quite a bit about Brick, even though we were in San Francisco, where you don't think of that as a building material. And there's quite a bit of historic architecture out there, as you might imagine. So learning to work in that context set the stage for some of the projects I do today.

 

00;05;36;15 - 00;05;47;25

DP

So you've been Hacin how seen relative to all of the other things that you've done in the practice of architecture?

 

00;05;47;27 - 00;06;31;12

RC

My current role, which is relatively new one, starting as of last year, I'm managing principal of the firm, our founding principal, after 30 years, and a lot of growth, decided that it would be a good idea to get a new batch of principals. So we have five of us now, in addition to David Hacin and as the managing principal.

 

My job, of course, is to try to help us stay focused on the business side of the practice, which, as you may know, as an architect, isn't the most fun part. However, it does matter tremendously, and I like to think of it as fundamental to helping us do the great design work we do, because ultimately, if we don't do good business work, we're not going to be able to do great design work.

 

00;06;31;15 - 00;06;37;25

DP

So true. So let's dig in here and talk a little bit about the project. How did you guys get the work?

 

00;06;37;27 - 00;07;38;12

RC

Sure. As with many projects in Boston, it's a very much relationship based city. This owner, the Hamilton Company, is old company and one of the largest landlords in Boston founded by Harold Brown. And in that very neighborhood that the project exists, we developed a relationship with them and they reached out to us specifically because they understood that we knew how to fit new buildings into existing neighborhoods, as well as to help owners like this company navigate the sometimes complex approvals process, which you find in many East Coast cities.

 

And Boston is certainly one that has its web of interested parties in every project. The Hamilton Company, however, because of being a longstanding company, has very good relationships with the neighborhood, with neighborhood association owns as well as the city. And so it was a good partnership in coming up with a design that would appeal to a lot of different factions.

 

00;07;38;14 - 00;07;45;19

DP

So tell us a little bit about the site, the history of the location, what was there and what you guys ultimately built.

 

00;07;45;21 - 00;08;45;14

RC

This site, which is an area called Packard's Crossing, which is so named because originally it was a location of a Packard car manufacturing plant, is a mixed use site. It has a lot of Boston rowhouses that go further down the street from our location. But the location of the particular project did have some of those more industrial uses.

 

And in the more recent years it had been transformed somewhat into parking lots and some low rise retail in ways that weren't necessarily sensitive to the neighborhood. As it happens, one of those buildings was the owners primary headquarters, and so it was a very near and dear to them that they do something on this site, which was good.

 

And because this was their headquarters, they owned numerous properties that adjoins. So they undertook a master planning process with us to think about how they could not only develop a 55 Brighton but 83 Gardiner, which is nearby and tie it all together in a sensitive way.

 

00;08;45;17 - 00;08;51;19

DP

So what was the ultimate scope and what were the programmatic requirements for the project? The building you designed.

 

00;08;51;21 - 00;09;52;29

RC

The program for 55 Brighton, on the face of it, is a fairly straightforward program. It's 77 rental units, a housing and parking garage for that housing as well as retail that would line Brighton Avenue, which is a mixed use street. The more interesting or maybe effective overlay of that program is that this collection of blocks has several landscaped alleys to help connect people from front to back.

 

The streets in this neighborhood aren't necessarily as frequent as some city streets are. And so having pedestrian connections through the block were an important part of the planning of the project, as well as part of the approvals for the project. And the project itself is a fairly typical four and five stories of housing overtop of a parking podium kind of housing project, which you see all over the country.

 

But we had hoped to blend it in with the neighborhood, of course, and so had to find ways to tie it together.

 

00;09;53;01 - 00;10;20;18

DP

Yeah, it's an interesting building. So you guys had to do a bunch of things with the architect. Sure. You used a lot of masonry out there, various colors, but the brick patterning and specifically stylistically the building facade as it sort of peels away in a number of locations. Very interesting. So the building's contemporary, particularly the cantilevered folding panels, and yet you utilize brick and various traditional patterns and colors.

 

So tell us a little bit about that.

 

00;10;20;21 - 00;12;26;05

RC

Sure. Our approach to the design of the facade, especially on Brighton Avenue, was the kind we take to many of our projects, which is to look carefully at the context. We look at not only what's built today, but what was built in the neighborhood previously and of course, like many of these traditional neighborhoods, there's a strong rhythm of bays and of brick along the street, which on one hand we wanted to pick up some kind of rhythm, but on the other hand, we certainly didn't want to just mimic it.

 

That's always the challenge we have as designers is how do we build something for today in a neighborhood from yesterday? So what we chose to do in this case, as you mentioned, is we peel the brick facade back in a regular rhythm of bays, which echoes those bays further down the street. But we do it in a way that isn't just your traditional symmetrical bay.

 

It lifts the facade apart in a sense. So when you're looking at it from one direction, you see a rhythm of brick bays. When you look at it from the other direction, it looks like a number of vertical metal turrets that are more reflective of what you see beyond because in that direction you're looking towards downtown, where you see a lot of the towers of downtown Boston.

 

So that was an important design aspect as well that you had a different experience of this building from one direction than you do from the other. And then one other aspect of that design choice has to do with how brick is used today. We no longer build load bearing brick walls. There's a lot of reasons for that, as much as we love them, but there are many, many load bearing brick walls in Boston.

 

So when we peel these elements back, we're just using face brick cavity wall construction like you see on all contemporary construction. But we wrapped it around, so it's the thickness of a load bearing wall, but you can still see that it's suspended in there. It's a little bit of a tongue in cheek acknowledgment of it's both symbolic of a load bearing material, but also it's being used in a way that's contemporary as a way to clad the building and give it a sense of identity.

 

00;12;26;08 - 00;12;37;26

DP

So let's back up just for a second. I always like to ask the architects about the project restrictions they had in regard to zoning or historical requirements. Could you talk a little bit about that?

 

00;12;37;28 - 00;12;45;19

RC

This project, like everywhere in Boston, as I mentioned, we have a robust approvals process for any larger projects.

 

00;12;45;19 - 00;12;50;06

DP

I like the word robust, it's very respectful.

 

00;12;50;13 - 00;13;49;06

RC

All the intentions are good. Sometimes it can become complex. Of course, this project is larger than would have normally been allowed by the underlying zoning, so it went through this process to approve a larger building and part of those approvals then have a lot to do with review of the design to make sure that the design is going to mitigate the scale of the building fit into the neighborhood in ways that we hope we've been able to be successful here, and that also there are elements to the design which contribute to the neighborhood, which gets back to some of those connections in the landscaping that I mentioned.

 

And as it happens on top of the rear of the building on one level, up on the parking is an extensively landscaped courtyard which is made for the residents of the building. So to this approval, we of course, had to meet with neighborhood groups. We had to go through numerous public hearings and we think we reached a place where all parties felt like there was a good compromise with this building.

 

00;13;49;08 - 00;13;51;14

DP

So was there a historical review.

 

00;13;51;20 - 00;14;02;26

RC

In this particular neighborhood? Interestingly enough, there was not a historic district review. This piece of Boston, although it has a lot of buildings from long ago, is not a designated landmark district.

 

00;14;02;28 - 00;14;27;09

DP

Interesting. Yeah, I thought the notion of showing this facade as it peels away as a thick masonry wall, this kind of tongue in cheek reference to historic architecture is really interesting. A great idea. Tell us a little bit about the building and plan. It looks like a giant rectangle, and yet you've done an awful lot with the facade and the undulations in the forms.

 

00;14;27;11 - 00;16;39;13

RC

That's one simple thing about the building is that the site is a rectangle, which we don't get a lot of those in Boston. So we were excited about that. But the housing portion component is an L-shape because as you know, with multifamily housing, there's a dimension which plays itself out really well. The rectangle of the footprint of the building has to do with the parking.

 

So the front of that is lined with retail on the building lobby. And then above that is the two lengths of the L-shaped housing. What we did with that then is to articulate those different volumes. That's also where we turn to the brick patterning to identify the different areas of the building. And we had to do this though, within some constraints of course, because this is a rental building and the owners wanted to keep the housing reasonably affordable.

 

So all of the brick we use is actually just standard modular brick, which means it's the kind of brick that we love because it's easy to lay out. It creates an eight inch by eight inch grid on the building and to be creative with modular brick, we had to do things like turn the brick on its side, create soldier courses and find ways to push the brick inward and outwards to create shadow lines.

 

And one of the aspects of these fins on the front of the building that we've been talking about is that they actually curve outward from the main facade. But we wanted to achieve this curve without buying any special bricks. And when the contractors did their mock up and brought it out in the sun, everybody to our horror, recognized that it was creating all kinds of jagged shadows because the bricks were rectangular and they were trying to create a curve in order to help them with that.

 

We actually went back to our drawings. We laid out the coursing of those brick courses and created them some full sized brick causing diagrams, which the Masons then used. They relayed out the mockups and it came out looking smooth. And this was one of those cases where what we love about Brick is it depends so much on the Masons and their desire and skill to make things work.

 

And that back and forth really, I think made the building much better.

 

00;16;39;16 - 00;17;04;29

DP

So let's start with the parameters for building materials. When you guys got rolling, did you just decide, Well, Boston's got a lot of bricks, so that's what we're going to use for the majority of the building. And then talk a little bit more about some of these coursing tapes that you use, because I did see some soldier coursing.

 

I saw some regular type of courses. And then, of course, there are all kinds of strategies to create shadow lines in the facade underneath the windows, etc..

 

00;17;05;01 - 00;18;17;23

RC

Yeah, the decision to use brick, as you say, dug was a pretty foregone conclusion. We were working in a block where all of the existing buildings, the historic buildings were brick, and it's the kind of material that really helps bring identity to the building in a way that people feel like fits with Boston. This was an idea that sometimes we fight as designers, we think we want to do something new in this city that's all made out of bricks.

 

But I think over time we've come to recognize that the fact of Brick in Boston is one that's time tested. It's one that brings identity to the place. And so we accepted it fairly quickly and then set out to figure out, well, how do we create different proportions, different forms, and articulate the building with these bricks as well as bring different colors to it.

 

So it's not all just red brick. We did use a much darker brick for the base of the building, which helps ground the building helps those bays feel like they're floating up above. And then in the courtyard we use some yellow brick, which is not what you see from the street. It gives you some variation for the expression of the building and also brightens up that space.

 

00;18;17;25 - 00;18;24;20

DP

Could you tell us a little bit more about the coursing types and the strategies to create shadow lines in the facade?

 

00;18;24;23 - 00;19;10;10

RC

Yes, we were constrained to using just regular shaped bricks. One of the coursing techniques we used was to help with the rhythm of the windows of the building. With housing, you get repetitive windows because we want to use the same kind of windows and we have repetitive apartment units. However, we wanted to create some different scale to those windows, and we use this by creating brick panels which frame some of the windows and help the windows appear to create larger patterns on the facade.

 

And in these brick patterns, we simply stacked the bricks and then pushed every other brick inward by about an inch, which created this nice textured shadow line, which gave it a little bit of depth similar to the depth the window had. That was one of the techniques we used to help give the building some life.

 

00;19;10;12 - 00;19;28;08

DP

So it's also interesting you guys ended up doing mock ups, which we all as architects end up seeing in the field an awful lot of times when we're using a lot of masonry or when things get complex. How did you do the drawings? The architectural drawings, were there 3D, was it BIM modeling, was it 2D?

 

00;19;28;10 - 00;20;38;26

RC

On this project, like many of our projects, we have both a design model and then a construction model. So early on we built the building and sketch up that lets us study forms colors fairly quickly and do variations to help dial in some of the aspects of the building which are going to be most conducive to the design as well as lets us be flexible with some of the city approvals processes when different requirements are brought up around the design development phase, though, we certainly built the same model in Revit and that becomes the actual construction model and Revit is where we really get into the brick detailing.

 

We don't draw every single brick, although we sometimes like our clients to think we're doing that. We use a combination of patterns on the surface of the model, which are very accurate to the brick module with certain areas where we will go in and manually layout the coursing because we know it needs to work in a certain way.

 

And so we do love using these tools. They really help us make sure that what we draw is what the Masons are going to be able to build.

 

00;20;38;28 - 00;21;01;25

DP

Yeah, I was really surprised when I was looking at the photographs, the peeling facade, if you will, these fan like projections. There was one photograph I looked at and you can actually start to see the curve the way the brick is manipulated in the facade. So it's not a hard line. I did not expect that when I saw that photograph.

 

That must have been really interesting to see worked out in the field.

 

00;21;01;27 - 00;22;01;22

RC

It was very interesting to see worked out in the field. That curve, however simple it seemed to us, was actually somewhat difficult for the Masons to achieve. They did do a mock up of that curve, which was not successful initially because when they laid out that mock up and put it in the sun, we saw immediately that the corners of the bricks were shadowing over top of each other, that they were struggling to make sure the crossing was smooth.

 

And so we went back to our drawings and we laid out each course a brick for them and printed a full sized drawing of that, causing to have them give that a try because we use the geometry of the curve to lay out where the corners should fall. Then when the Masons used that template and rebuilt the mockup, it actually came out quite smooth, which is the result you see today.

 

And we're actually kind of excited because that's a 20 degree change in plain between the face of the building and those projections, and it's achieved in two and a half courses of brick.

 

00;22;01;25 - 00;22;03;16

DP

My gosh, that's incredible.

 

00;22;03;19 - 00;22;08;04

RC

Flat bricks too. So we didn't have to buy curved bricks, which nobody likes to do.

 

00;22;08;06 - 00;22;16;15

DP

Did you do that by making the radius larger for that curve rather than having a smaller radius? Am I understanding that correctly?

 

00;22;16;17 - 00;22;37;28

RC

It was almost simpler than that. The radius didn't change. It's just which parts of the brick touched the radius needed to be adjusted because the Masons were having the corners and the flats of the bricks that were of course with each other overlapping in a way that cast shadows. And if we just moved those back, the shadows faded away.

 

00;22;38;04 - 00;22;44;01

DP

Very cool. So how many people were on the team working on the building over time?

 

00;22;44;03 - 00;23;10;16

RC

From the start of the project, we had just a couple of people. We had our project manager, Jeff Brown, as well as a couple of junior designers helping with the various models and presentations. By the time we got to CDs, there were five of us putting the drawings together and then for construction it was down back to just two of us getting through the various needs of the construction site.

 

00;23;10;18 - 00;23;14;23

DP

And how long was the process start to finish, including reviews.

 

00;23;14;25 - 00;23;42;12

RC

These kind of projects, tt's always interesting to answer that question because we've been working on this site with this owner for over ten years. This project was in the queue to it's the biggest one on the site, but it was one of the last ones we did with them. So the early ideas for it were probably seven or eight years ago.

 

But by the time we started the actual design, that took a little over a year and a half, then the construction took about two and a half years.

 

00;23;42;14 - 00;23;51;03

DP

So I love to ask architects if there was anything interesting through the design and construction process that you guys learned that was kind of new to you?

 

00;23;51;05 - 00;24;55;27

RC

Yeah, I think this project probably one of the more interesting and challenging but creative aspects of the project is that this client is their own developer and their own contractor. They are the ones who both financed the building and built the building, but they did hire us to design the building and of course hired the subcontractors to build the building with them.

 

But there were many times when you're working with a client who is building their own buildings that they are in a hurry because they figured they know what they're doing and they want to move forward and so very often we would find ourselves kind of rushing to stay, keep up with them. And what I think was an important lesson for us or something we were glad about is that we did take the time to do a really strong set of drawings during the design phase so that every time the client tried to get ahead of us, we had a good set of documents to help them not get into trouble.

 

That's not always the case. Sometimes clients will hurry you through the design with the thought that during construction you can figure out some more of the details.

 

00;24;56;00 - 00;25;00;24

DP

So the project wasn't bid out then to a contractor or it was?

 

00;25;00;27 - 00;25;11;02

RC

The project was not bid out to a general contractor because the general contractor was the client. However, they did bid out all of the different trades, including the masonry trades.

 

00;25;11;04 - 00;25;15;01

DP

So it was an extraordinarily thorough set by the time you guys were done.

 

00;25;15;08 - 00;25;19;17

RC

We did have a very strong set of drawings which always makes us happy and protects us.

 

00;25;19;19 - 00;25;32;24

DP

Makes things a little easier down the road. So, Rob, you've been an architect for a while. Based on what you know today about being an architect, do you have any words of advice for your younger self or even young architects coming down the pike?

 

00;25;32;27 - 00;25;56;13

RC

Sure. I think one of the pieces of advice I have learned over the career is it really matters to trust in the simplicity of design and to keep things basic. You may think, as I did as a young designer, that you need to add a lot of ideas and things like Brick are boring. But actually if you just stick with the basics, you can come up with quite an elegant solution.

 

00;25;56;15 - 00;26;33;06

DP

Yeah, I always find that interesting, this idea that when you have limitations or parameters, many times young people think, Well, I'm not going to be able to do anything creative inside of this notion that things should be simple or minimal in some way. And yet I think that is the key to creating things that have never been done before.

 

Perhaps I love this idea that when I'm given lots of restrictions, I still have to be, I still want to be creative. So I think that ties a little bit into what you just said.

 

00;26;33;09 - 00;26;54;11

RC

I completely agree. I think something else we find about trying to stick with the basics is very often when you're trying to tell a story and come up with a concept which other people can understand, you really have to stick to the story and stick to the basics. And so these rules were made for a reason and they're really great to flex and learn from.

 

00;26;54;14 - 00;27;03;24

DP

Well, Rob, thank you very much for being with us today. And thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about Hacin Architecture and Design and yourself?

 

00;27;03;26 - 00;27;21;20

RC

Thank you, Doug. It's been a great pleasure to be here today. And you can go to www.Hacin.com to learn about us or come to Boston's South End. And we're always happy to give people a tour of both our projects and a lot of the great historic architecture in Boston.

 

00;27;21;22 - 00;27;27;28

DP

Well, thanks again, Rob. Beautiful project. Congratulations. And we'll see you around Boston.

 

00;27;28;01 - 00;27;31;10

RC

Thank you, Doug.