Office dA in boston

By Raymund Ryan - 7 January 2010

The Macallen Building, the first large project to be completed by Office dA, slopes up to the border of South Boston as a sleek monolith. This enigmatic character may even allude, suggests Nader Tehrani, who directs Office dA with Monica Ponce de Leon, to the Sphinx of ancient Egypt. Given its exposure - a post-industrial site with raised highway and bus garage to the south and multiple railway tracks to the west - and its contents -140 apartments, parking and retail spaces - the building is inevitably monumental. Yet its skin or pelt, adjusting in turn to each exposure, and its incised ridge of private terraces suggest a quality that is almost animalistic. The massing results from the union or hybridisation of two standard forms - row housing and the point tower. From this typological starting-point, Office dA connects lower and higher elements within a cranked, articulate envelope. At one short end of the site, the new monolith has an even parapet six stories high facing Dorchester Avenue, a traditional street in the process of gentrification. The new structure rises, however, and stretches along heavily-trafficked West Fourth Street to a peak fourteen stories high (eleven stories of apartments above three trays of parking). The short lower end and this long inhabited wall together protect a raised communal terrace facing west and north. The observant will notice particular qualities to the skin on all facades. The walls are not of course load-bearing - they are taut membranes made from brick, glass and metal panel. Suspended above the retail spaces, addressing Dorchester Avenue, vertical panels of brick create an elegant checkerboard pattern of positive and negative, the “negative” simulating the scale and appearance of normative window openings. As the bricks are laid vertically, and un-staggered, the smooth panels read almost as decorative shields. The intermittent glazed panes are progressively recessed from this outer brick datum such that light,...