By David P. Manfredi, FAIA, LEED AP – Founding Principal, Elkus Manfredi Architects
Union Point is a new city on 1,500 acres at the intersecting point of the towns of Weymouth, Rockland, and Abington, Massachusetts. Elkus Manfredi Architects has developed the master plan for Union Point with Sasaki Associates.
Union Point is more than a Smart City. Rooted in a human-scaled, 21st-century urbanism, it combines the attributes and energy of a city – including elements such as easy access to public transportation, entertainment and sports venues, education, art, and culture – with 1,000 acres of protected habitat linked to a network of 50 miles of trails plus public parks, open spaces, and pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly roadways. Union Point will combine tomorrow’s communications and smart-living/working technologies for an all-inclusive environment featuring living, workplace, and leisure options that will foster a connected, diverse community.
Union Point is one of the largest remaining parcels of its size in the highly sought-after metropolitan Boston area. As one of only a handful of projects of comparable scale and ambition in the country and around the globe, Union Point is the first of these ground-up developments that is designed as a Smart City. More than just intelligent and unbounded connectivity through an open-source digital technology platform, Union Point, at its heart, is being created as a pioneer city focused on unleashing the potential of the human spirit in an inclusive community that can enhance and invigorate the human experience.
What is a “Smart City?” A Smart City is a connected urban environment that integrates multiple information and communication technologies to manage a city's assets, improve the efficiency of services, and meet residents' needs.
Union Point is also a sustainable community: development will occupy about one-third of the property, leaving 1,000 acres as natural habitat. Elkus Manfredi has designed a flexible framework of buildings, streets, open spaces, and greenways as the foundation for the sustainable and healthy evolution of the community over time.
The multinational professional services firm, Arup, has built a complementary and scalable infrastructure master plan to address Union Point’s zero-carbon future and guide the stewardship of its natural water and energy resources. Solar collectors and heat pumps will be part of the power system. Storage batteries will save electric power for future uses, and streets will be designed for pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as our vehicular (autonomous) car future. At least 90% of the roofs without mechanical function, such as solar collection sites, will be green, planted to provide garden spaces that reduce heat-island effects and address stormwater runoff, graywater re-use, and green wastewater treatment solutions.
Union Point is unique. Elkus Manfredi Architects has been committed to an agenda of sustainability since our founding in 1988, but this is an opportunity to think about those issues at scale, and to move them beyond sustainability to a more regenerative vision. This is not just one building or block of buildings; this is a new city that includes offices, residences, retail, technology, and more.
LStar Ventures, Union Point’s developer, has made a commitment to see Union Point through to completion, an undertaking that requires vision, a talented team of experts, steely determination, and considerable resources. An example of LStar’s singular commitment: early in the process, LStar, unlike previous would-be developers, invested extensive time and energy in winning the consensus of the three towns in which Union Point is located.
Nurturing a community will be an important test for this forward-thinking development. Union Point is about trying to make places that change people’s experience and therefore their behaviors. Elkus Manfredi believes that the quality of our environment affects the quality of our lives. When you walk and bike instead of sitting in cars, your lifestyle is healthier and you are more connected to your neighbors. Union Point envisions an enhanced human experience in which a culturally rich environment can educate and inspire a community, igniting the collective potential.
Curiosity is one essential element that makes good architecture and urban planning: you have to look, listen, and learn. It is extraordinarily hard to put together a project that is as large as Union Point and only 20 minutes from Boston with access to public transportation and the cooperation of three towns. In order to design and build Union Point, the team of LStar Ventures, Elkus Manfredi Architects, and Sasaki Associates has undergone a process of intense looking and listening. We have learned a great deal.
Union Point is a living laboratory for what we believe in: a community that can serve as a paradigm for other forward-thinking cities around the world. More than technologically and sustainably innovative, Union Point will inspire other developments to address the future as a community built on respect, inclusivity, and shared learning. At Union Point, our hope is to ensure that people, individually and collectively, can positively adapt to and embrace the accelerating changes in the world around us.
Did you know indoor air sensors can be used to not only provide higher indoor environmental quality, but also improve energy efficiency and reduce utility costs as well?
In the face of growing energy costs, the University of Cambridge’s Hutchison/MRC Research Centre was met with the unsettling prospect of reducing life-saving cancer research to pay utility bills. After implementing a unique airside solution that allows ventilation to vary based on laboratory conditions, Hutchison/MRC reduced total natural gas costs by approximately 41 percent in the first year, and by 54 percent in year two. The total electricity bill was reduced by 9 percent. The new system, which had a payback of less than 2 years, also helped reduce carbon emissions.
The new solution would modify the center's traditional variable air volume (VAV) control in lab spaces with the demand-based Aircuity system, which allows the ventilation to vary based on conditions in each laboratory. With numerous installations at U.S. university laboratories, the Aircuity system proposed for the Hutchison/MRC Research Centre would be the first in the United Kingdom.
Aircuity, a USGBC MA Chapter Sponsor, is the smart airside efficiency company providing building owners with sustained energy savings through its intelligent measurement solutions. By addressing the inherent deficiencies in conventional approaches to energy efficient building ventilation, Aircuity's smart solutions deliver significant energy savings for a wide range of commercial, institutional and lab building applications without sacrificing occupant comfort, productivity or safety.
Aircuity's mission is to be an industry leader in the optimization of building ventilation for sustainable energy efficiency, safety, and operational performance.
SMMA is excited to announce that one of the 2017 Nobel Laureates in Physics is none other than Rainer Weiss, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and former SMMA client. In 1997 SMMA took on a laboratory relocation project for MIT and Weiss's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) team. Their former location at MIT's Radiation Lab Bulding #23, now the Historic MIT Radiation Lab Plaque, was set to be demolished and re-designed by architect Frank Gehry, leaving Weiss and his team searching for new lab space.
Radiation Lab #23 was set inside of an old mill-style building dating as far back as World War II. With top secret radar research being conducted there at the time, the building was not efficient enough to meet the needs of the researchers. When it was decided that an artificial intelligence lab would go in its place, LIGO lab ended up relocating to Albany Street inside of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
The SMMA team for the project, made up of Ara Krafian, Phil Poinelli, Parker Symmes, Mark O'Brien, Mike Powers, Paul Livernois, and Richard Croswell, consistently met with researchers in order to understand the needs of the lab, and properly fit out the space with the equipment necessary for gravitational-wave research.
“The biggest challenge in this project was vibration control, especially with there being a train spur on the opposite side of the building,” explained Phil Poinelli, FAIA, ALEP, LEED AP, and MCPPA. “The trains that used to run through were freight trains serving East Cambridge, so it was important for us to create the kind of isolation necessary for a piece of equipment (such as the interferometer) that could be disturbed by outside vibration.”
In 2016 Weiss was also awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, and the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics for his shared work with Ronald Drever and Kip S. Thorne, co-founders of LIGO.
We are honored to announce Consulate General of Canada as our newest Advocate Level sponsor.
The Consulate General of Canada in Boston provides useful support to over 60 Canadian companies from a variety of industries including biotech, manufacturing, security, and building products. Their office connects Canadian companies to the New England states of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Welcome to our sponsoring partner community, Consulate General of Canada in Boston. We are proud to have you as a partner and look forward to accomplishing great things together.
Linnean analyzed four design scenarios for the Martin Luther King School, designed by Perkins Eastman, to identify the design that would produce the least amount of embodied and operational emissions throughout the life of the building.
Linnean conducted a life-cycle analysis of the building’s materials to determine the carbon emissions from embodied carbon, and analyzed annual operating emissions from each design scenario. We examined whether retrofitting the existing building would save carbon over time, or whether tearing down the building and designing an entirely new facility would be more energy and carbon efficient.
The final analysis concluded that tearing down the original building (a brutalist concrete structure built in the 1960s) and replacing it with either of the three new designs would produce fewer emissions than retrofitting over time. Even considering the emissions resulting from the demolition and waste of the existing structure, the existing envelope and mechanical systems were so inefficient that they would cause significantly higher annual emissions than constructing one of the new designs proposed.
Image of Cambridge’s Martin Luther King, Jr. School.
Often overlooked, the design of a building can make a significant impact on health, accessibility and safety. Today, many architects, designers, planners, engineers and construction teams are looking to specific improvements to build or rennovate in ways that improve both indoor and outdoor environments of buildings.
The Northern Essex Community College (NECC) community recently celebrated the newly renovated $18 million, 80,000 SF Spurk Building, one of the most widely used academic buildings on the college’s Haverhill campus. RDK Engineers, an NV5 Company, worked alongside the project architect, DiMella Shaffer Associates, providing MEP/FP engineering design services for transforming and renovating the classroom building which plays a critical role in the success of NECC students.
Building improvements included:
Air Quality Improvements: The entire building will have a central ventilation system and air conditioning.
Accessibility Upgrades: Accessibility changes included new and renovated entrance ramps, proper door clearance, extension of the accessible parking lot toward the building, and new chairs, wheelchair spots, and companion seats.
Safety Advances: Life safety changes will include additional fire protection, a sprinkler room, and stairwell improvements including the enclosure of the central stairwell.
Congratulations to USGBC MA Chapter Sponsor RDK Engineers and the entire project team on the completion of the Spurk Building renovation! These upgrades will contribute to an enhanced learning environment for the entire NECC community.
