Architect Scott Payette lets old steel beams and columns sprout out of new partitions in the studios of BNN-TV in Roxbury.
(John Horner)
Architecture
Talk about new wine in an old bottle: What about bright new TV studios in the rotting carcass of an abandoned MBTA substation in Roxbury?
It's just been done, and it's one of those small gems of architecture that too often go unnoticed.
The modern quarters for a public-access TV station, filled with sunlight and glass and high-tech electronic equipment, are tucked into what feels like the belly of a battleship.
Architect Scott Payette celebrates the muscle of the old building. In his interior, powerful old steel beams and columns sprout like trees out of new partitions. A massive traveling crane hangs in the air like a prized artwork. Ancient stained wood panels are used as wall finish, looking like abstract paintings.
The inhabitants of this delightful place are the crew of BNN-TV. BNN is a public-access station that specializes in culture and education. It runs dance groups, gospel groups, festivals, and a so-called "homework" program for students. It trains kids in how to do their own TV broadcasting.
There's an intentional contrast between the new architecture and the old substation. The substation was one huge room. Payette cuts it up as necessary with new partitions and lighting. But his work feels lightly built, as if perhaps it might be temporary. "It has some of the quality of a studio or a TV set, something you might take down," he says. "TV sets are often not fully finished spaces."
Payette also compares BNN to the Tate Modern museum in London, a huge former power station on the Thames that is now a showpiece for contemporary art. "They're both existing industrial buildings with an artistic use," he says. "They retain the industrial language."
Sheathed in brick and stucco, with a grand arched entry, the BNN building looks like a church. It originally contained four huge dynamos, electric generators that converted alternating current to direct current for the trains. Perhaps in the back of the original architect's mind were the thoughts of Boston historian Henry Adams, who after witnessing a dynamo in 1900 at a Paris exposition was so impressed that he called it a cultural symbol for his era comparable to the Virgin in the Middle Ages. BNN reminds you of an era when Bostonians built even this kind of everyday public infrastructure with a level of civic pride we've mostly lost.
The MBTA abandoned the building in 1987, the year the elevated Washington Street Orange Line was decommissioned. By the time BNN and architect Payette got to it, it was a wreck. Vandals had stripped everything salvageable, even the copper sheathing of the window frames. The interior was filled with pigeons and their guano. A sad example of our throwaway modern culture, the building was left to rot.
Some federal funding was used for the renovation, and as a result the National Park Service mandated that the exterior be restored as closely as possible to its original appearance. Except for a handsome BNN logo and sign - yet to arrive - the substation now looks much as it always did. It dates from 1909 and stands at 3025 Washington St., near the corner of Columbus in Roxbury. Urban Edge, a nonprofit developer, joined with BNN for the redevelopment
Aside from the visual delight of bubbly new architecture sloshing around in an old brick-and-steel bottle, there are other merits to the BNN building. Heating and cooling are geothermal, an investment that's predicted to pay back within eight years. The office spaces are delightful. Most of the partitions are glass, lined up in such a way that you can stand outside the front door and see all the way through the building and out the back door. Daylight streams down this path. The architect has designed new workstations that are both cheaper and more pleasant than the usual corporate cubicles.
A good city, wrote MIT planning professor Kevin Lynch, should be "time-deep." You should be able to find, within the present world, a tracery of hints, remnants, and ghosts of worlds of the past. Such a city is richer than anything built all at one time.
A building can be time-deep too. BNN is a contemporary place that is also the ghost of a past place.
Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
