Boathouse is a model of form and function
A break with the Victorian past and walls that move set a new standard
There are 10 boathouses along the Charles River. They exist for the amateurs who love to get out, maybe at the first light of dawn, to row the river - sometimes for fun, sometimes in practice for serious competitions like the famous Head of the Charles Regatta.
Most of the boathouses look Victorian. The oldest are Harvard's Newell, of 1899, and Weld, of 1907. They seem rich and aristocratic, with their textured materials and gable roofs. Most of the newer boathouses, including a couple from recent years, try to project a similar upper-class image.
That's why the architecture of the exuberant new Community Rowing Boathouse in Brighton is such a joy. This is a building that's happy to look fresh, new, democratic, and up-to-date, not like an attempt to remind you of the good old days when rowing was a "gentleman's sport."
This is one of the best new pieces of architecture in Boston. The architects, Nick Winton and Alex Anmahian, of the firm Anmahian Winton in Cambridge, took their signals not from older boathouses but from American barns, especially tobacco barns. That's not so silly when you think of it, since both tobacco barns and boathouses are basically storage sheds that contain objects - tobacco leaves or rowing shells - that need to be stored and dried out.
So much is right about this place. There are two buildings: a small one (the Ruth W. Somerville Sculling Pavilion), made of glass, which contains the single sculls; and a much larger one (the Harry Parker Boathouse), surfaced in wood, which houses up to 200 eight-oared shells. Seen indoors, the shells are huge: each is 60 feet long with 13-foot oars.
Every other boathouse on the Charles opens directly onto the river, with a ramp for easing the shells into the water. The ramps look nice, but they block the path of any person walking or jogging along the riverbank. Community Rowing has a better idea. The buildings are pulled back from the water's edge, leaving the public path intact. When a crew carries a shell out of the building, it simply crosses the path and lowers the shell from any segment of the 420 feet of dock.
But what's most striking about these buildings is the way everything moves. The outer walls are not the solid surfaces they at first appear. Sometimes wood and sometimes glass, they're mechanically operated. You pull a switch and the walls slowly open, like huge Venetian blinds, so air can enter and circulate to cool the interiors and help dry the boats. It's predicted that even in the second-floor offices, air conditioning will be required only a few days of the summer. (The buildings are heated and cooled by geothermal wells, keeping energy consumption to a minimum.)
The movable side walls are an idea taken from tobacco barns, where the walls are often made of wood planks on hinges and can be propped open to let air circulate. Here, the result is more pleasing: When the Parker's wood walls open up, you don't see tobacco, you see the boats inside. They become part of the architecture. At the Somerville, the whole pavilion becomes a glass showcase for the elegant sculls within.
The ends of both buildings are operable too, but in a different way. Doors like those of an airplane hanger simply fold up and out of the way when it's time for a crew to carry out a boat.
Community Rowing Inc. - it's usually called CRI for short - is an institution as remarkable as its new home. It was founded in 1985 by former members of famed coach Harry Parker's crews at Harvard. Until now, it stored its boats in a nearby skating rink. In the new building, says Anmahian, "They wanted an architectural image contrary to the other boathouses, which they see as elitist. They wanted a contemporary building that would set itself apart." There was no Victorian precedent, anyway, for a boathouse this big.
CRI is indeed anything but elitist. It runs a rowing program for girls in Boston schools, many of them from disadvantaged backgrounds, helping nearly all of them go on to college. (CRI coaches show up for the girls' high-school graduations.) There's a program, too, for rowers in wheelchairs. CRI provides coaches and lessons, and the new building contains a workout facility.
CRI is the largest rowing club in the country, as measured by the number of boats. Half the boats you see on the Charles, in fact, come from this club. An average of 350 rowers show up on a typical summer morning. CRI is a private nonprofit membership organization, with some 1,500 members. The website is www.communityrowing.org.
At least one superstar architect, Santiago Calatrava, is famous for designing buildings with roofs and walls that move. The difference is that Calatrava's work is showmanship. His moving parts are a kind of mobile sculpture. The operable walls at CRI, by contrast, exist to serve a purpose, and they shape a building that looks purposeful rather than pictorial. This is a building that itself is, in a sense, an athlete.
Anmahian and Winton, both graduates of Harvard's architecture school, founded their firm in 1992. Since then they've established a reputation as one of the best in Boston. Architects tend to flourish at older ages than, say, mathematicians, and Anmahian and Winton, now in their late 40s, are only beginning to get the kind of challenging work they'd like to do.
Earlier projects by the firm in the Boston area include the fine Cambridge 1 pizza bar, in Harvard Square, and the inventive Orange UK offices, in East Cambridge, where some walls are on wheels so spaces can be reshaped for different functions. The partners are currently working on a larger project, a mixed-use town center, with small city blocks and narrow pedestrian passages, in downtown New Canaan, Conn.
CRI isn't quite finished. There are paving and landscaping still to be done, including a green roof. But even in December, it's drawing 250 rowers a day. The land is leased from the state Department of Conservation and Recreation. The state also kicked in $2 million of the construction cost, which totaled $11.5 million.
Some readers, I realize, would rather see a riverbank lined with nostalgic fake Victoriana. But for those who don't want to live in a stage set, Community Rowing is a contemporary triumph.
Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com. 