Architects selected for North Point

By Thomas C. Palmer Jr., Globe Staff, 9/18/2003

Moving the huge North Point project in Cambridge quickly toward reality, development managers yesterday named three firms that will design the initial blocks of the 45-acre, mixed-use minicity on a former railyard.

The firms, from Toronto, Culver City, Calif., and Stuttgart, Germany, were chosen from a pool of more than 100 companies that had sought to participate in creating from the ground up a community near the MBTA's Lechmere Green Line station.

With more than 5 million square feet over 19 blocks to be built in several phases, North Point is planned as condominiums, apartments, office and laboratory space, and retail shops. It will include 2,500 residential units, ranking on its own as about the 250th largest community in Massachusetts.

The winning firms are: Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner Inc. of Stuttgart, Germany, and Venice, Calif., in partnership with Next Phase Studios of Boston; architectsAlliance of Toronto; and Steven Ehrlich Architects of Culver City, Calif., working with Symmes Maini & McKee Associates of Cambridge.

Although the lead firms boast years of experience and dozens of projects, all have worked primarily in their own regions -- California, Ontario, or Germany.

But urban planner Ken Greenberg, principal of Greenberg Consultants Inc. of Toronto, who acted as master planner for North Point and oversaw the competition to choose architects, said the winners are all creative companies on the verge of becoming internationally known.

"All three of these firms are actually branching out into other localities," Greenberg said in a telephone interview from Toronto. "We're catching three firms on the ascendance."

A panel of judges that chose the three firms had intended to reduce the number of finalists to six in July. But so many high-quality ideas came in, according to project manager Ralph F. Cox, that eight firms were kept in the final round.

Although the area's biggest single development project in the modern era, twice as big as University Park near MIT, North Point is not suffering the delays common to other Boston-area projects in the slow economy.

"They're obviously not hesitating," said Lester Barber, Cambridge's director of land use and zoning. He said North Point is moving forward quickly in part because its early planning coincided with a city rezoning process. Barber said, referring to the plan to build starting next year, "If they hold to that schedule, that would be a fairly expeditious implementation."

Construction on the first blocks of North Point is expected to begin late next year. Most of the pie-shaped piece of land is in Cambridge; one edge is in Somerville, and a small part on the east corner is in Charlestown.

The development will have a 6-acre park snaking through at various widths, and other greenspace between the buildings.

Greenberg said the winning proposals showed exceptional creativity and a real understanding of the urban location. "The jury felt we learned things about the site from every one of the competitors," he said. "It was incredibly interesting to see how they tackled the different sites."

Each firm among the finalists was assigned to one of three blocks that will be developed first: residential, commercial, and a parcel that combines residential and commercial uses. The firms were chosen based on their creative ideas, but have not been assigned to any particular use on any block. Up to 16 other firms will be chosen to design the rest of North Point. The development team -- a joint effort of Guilford Transportation Industries Inc. and Spaulding & Slye Colliers, a large national real estate services firm active in the Boston area -- took the unusual approach of drawing upon many contemporary architects so as to inject variety into the overall project.

Greenberg said the firms chosen showed environmental consciousness, using European energy conservation methods not yet standard practice in North America. Partly through the use of unusual materials, he said, they demonstrated a respect for the human dimension on blocks that could otherwise overwhelm pedestrians.

Steven Ehrlich in particular, Greenberg said, accommodated the scale of a megadevelopment to its future users in the drawings and models the firm submitted.

"They had a way of taking large volumes and articulating them so they would break down into small and interwoven elements," he said.

Thomas C. Palmer Jr. can be reached at tpalmer@globe.com.