Architects’ designs look to Dudley Square’s future

Micah Nemiroff

Imagine a new Dudley Square, with a thriving farmer’s market at its center and bus routes crisscrossing underneath the streets, providing more efficient public transportation while easing the snarl of congestion and traffic.

Picture a state-of-the-art community center, accented by verdant terraces and powered by reusable electricity, or a group of community farms sprouting from urban roots of concrete and steel, a unique economic and ecological model for creating green space deep in the heart of the Hub.

Asked to bring to life those and other new visions for the city’s 1.8-acre Dudley Square parcel, a group of area architectural design teams shared their work at a pair of recent events at Roxbury’s Hibernian Hall.

The first, a “community charrette” held in mid-April, gave designers and young architects an opportunity to display their work in its early stages and participate in a workshop that enabled members of the Roxbury community to offer feedback on the designs.

The second, held last Saturday, honored the four winning design proposals. Awards of $5,000 were presented in the Innovative Green Design and Best Community Building Initiative categories, with $10,000 going to the winners of the Best Building Design and Best Urban/Site Design contests.

The announcement of the four winners was the culmination of a design competition hosted by the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), the Common Boston initiative and the Boston Society of Architects, the largest chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Local designers were invited to offer strategies for redeveloping the Dudley Square parcel, which the city says will become available with the removal of two vacant buildings on Dudley Street and the relocation of the Boston Police Department’s Area B-2 substation to Washington Street. Proposals were asked to include a sustainable design with mixed uses, “including active ground-floor retail, upper-story commercial office uses and active open spaces,” and to “include innovative program and design ideas” appropriate to Dudley Square’s unique location, according to a March 2008 BRA announcement.

A host of Roxbury community members served as competition judges, including area residents and representatives from community groups.

The competition was held as a prelude to the American Institute of Architects National Convention, beginning today and running through Saturday at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in South Boston. Competitors ranged from young Boston planners to teams from prestigious local architectural firms.

As architectural competitions go, said BRA Chief Planner Kairos Shen, this one was unprecedented. Shen announced the winners along with Mayor Thomas M. Menino at Hibernian Hall last Saturday.

“This was unlike any typical architectural competition,” he said. “Designers are actually having conversations with the community about their ideas before they finalize [them].”

Those conversations are key, Shen added, because they enabled the community to see what is possible in the square and allowed the architects to work on the basics.

“We had to gauge where the community’s preferences are,” he said. “If we can imagine what things will look like, we can then begin to focus on the more mundane issues in an open way.”

Placing a premium on big ideas, the competition encouraged local architects not to restrict their imaginations. Rather than limiting the scope solely to the existing buildings, Shen said, they were free to re-envision the entire square.

The community had direct input from the start. The application process involved site visits where community members and architects walked around the proposed development area, discussing whether proposed features would or would not work.
The architects said they took the ideas generated from those visits to heart.

“From the beginning of our work, we were thinking of what was appropriate in scale and what would work with what is already here,” said Susann Schlaud, a spokeswoman for Miller Dyer Spears, one of the competing firms.

Stephen Moore, one of the planners who won the Innovative Green Design prize, said he felt the goal of the competition was not to completely change Dudley Square, but rather to better serve the community that is already there.

“We really tried to look at how the neighborhood can provide its own mixed income,” said Moore. “We felt it was important to come in and not gentrify the neighborhood.”

While some of the architects’ concepts may be visionary, original and bold, BRA planner Hugues Monestime said there is little likelihood these specific architectural plans will get developed as originally designed. He noted that the competition’s intent was not to discuss development that is feasible, but to spur community members and builders alike to imagine what can be done to the neighborhood.

“This is the fun part,” said Monestime, the senior planner overseeing the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan, a neighborhood planning agenda developed in 2004 by the BRA and Roxbury residents looking to maintain input in — and exercise influence on — any decisions made on development in their community. “This is to bring excitement and attention to Dudley Square.”

After announcing the winners, Menino stressed the importance of the redevelopment of Dudley Square.

“The development of the Ferdinand building, the Guscott building, the library and the B-2 station is at the core of the economic revitalization of this area of the city,” the mayor said, adding: “Soon, you will see things move forward, designs being created and construction being done.”

The submissions will be displayed at the American Institute of Architects Convention, starting today and running through May 17. For more information, visit www.architects.org/2008.