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Facades+AM Boston shines spotlight on three up-and-coming neighborhoods

Presenters offer inside look at Seaport District, Dudley Square, Kendall Square

Facades+AM Boston shines spotlight on three up-and-coming neighborhoods

In Boston, local AEC industry professionals face a particular challenge: how to move forward while honoring the past. “Boston is a unique city in terms of architecture, and new versus old,” said Ryan Salvas, Design Director at CW Keller & Associates and co-chair of the upcoming Facades+AM Boston symposium. Facades+AM, a quick-take version of the popular Facades+ conference series, makes its Beantown debut June 17. “There are a lot of forward-thinking academic programs in the area, but we also have, I would say, a very practical architecture base here,” continued Salvas. “It’s really about balancing historical references—and historical facades—but also looking forward to what’s new.”

Now is an especially good time to talk about high performance building envelopes in Boston, said Salvas’s co-chair, NADAAA principal Katherine Faulkner. “The city hasn’t seen this much development, easily, in a century,” she explained. “For Boston, it’s been an exciting last five years. But one thing that’s resulted is a lot of criticism—that the buildings are not inventive, not-forward thinking in terms of performance, that there’s nothing indigenous [to the region].”

 

Nine experts—including academics, designers, planners, developers, and municipal officials—will explore the upside of Boston’s rapid transformation (as well as its particular challenges) in three presentation blocks at Facades+AM Boston. Each session is framed around an up-and-coming Boston-area neighborhood. The first, “The Seaport District Revisited,” features presentations from CBT Architects‘ David Nagahiro, WS Development Associates‘ Richard Askin, and Utile Architecture & Planning‘s Tim Love. The second session, helmed by Mark Pasnick (over,under), David Carlson (Boston Redevelopment Authority), and Gerard Gutierrez (Sasaki Associates), shines a spotlight on “Facade and Regional Architecture,” with special focus on the Dudley Square area. The final group of presenters, NADAAA’s Nader Tehrani, Studio NYL‘s Christopher O’Hara, and Payette‘s Andrea Love, will zero in on “Boston’s High Performance Skyline,” especially in and around the tech hub of Kendall Square.

In planning the symposium, the biggest challenge Salvas and Faulkner faced was not having too little to talk about—it was having too much. “Any one of these topics could take up a full morning on its own,” admitted Faulkner. They nevertheless remain confident that the diversity of experiences represented by the panelists, in combination with the specificity of the sessions, will offer valuable insights to anyone interested in the aesthetics and pragmatics of high performance building envelopes.

To learn more about Facades+AM Boston, visit the symposium website. Seating is extremely limited, so register today!

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