FP3

a conversation with David Hacin and Scott Thomson on urban revitalization in Boston, MA
Markus Berger and Heinrich Hermann

The urban revitalization development FP3 (named for the Swiss born architect, David Hacin AIA, received his
three buildings it is comprised of in Boston’s Fort Point Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton University
Channel historic district) by Hacin + Associates Inc. has and his Master of Architecture from Harvard. David has
received national accolades including a prestigious AIA practiced architecture in a number of well known firms
Housing award. Robert Campbell praised it in the Bos- in New York and Boston and founded his own office,
ton Globe as “a new model of how to go about putting Hacin + Associates, Inc in 1993. Winner of numerous
new wine in the old bottle of a landmark neighborhood” awards, H+A’s retail and residential projects have been
and “a mix of thoughtful preservation with energetic in- featured in a wide range of international books and
1
vention, exactly the formula any thriving city needs.” publications. Davis has leadership roles in a number
It adaptively reused two turn-of-the-century brick ware- of professional and civic organizations such as Design
houses and filled an adjacent cavity with a third one, and Industry Groups of Massachusetts [DIGMA], Boston Civic
added a three-story rooftop addition above these three Design Commission, Boston Society of Architects and
structures. The resulting 140,000 sf mixed use building Boston Center for the Arts. David has taught architectural
contains 99 loft condominiums (including 5 affordable studios at both RISD and Northeastern University.
units and 3 affordable live/work artist studios), restau-
rant/retail space, and a lobby/art gallery. (Fig 2, aerial Scott Thomson is a registered architect who joined H+A
view of complex and context) in 1997. Before coming to H+A, Scott worked at CBT
Architects in Boston and Frank Gehry and Associates
in California on various projects for Disney. He received
his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Boston
Architectural College as valedictorian in 1992 where he
was awarded the John Worthington Ames Scholarship,
the AIA Henry Adams Medal and the John Steffian
Centennial Thesis Award honorable mention. Scott is a
Senior Associate at H+A.

1
Robert Campbell, “A design that’s on Point: South Boston condo complex fits its surroundings”, in The Boston Globe, April 19, 2009.

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1 view Congress Street street towards the city

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 IntAR: Which challenges did you face when you embarked on this work, politically, economically,
technically, and otherwise? And later, because you practice in many parts of the country and
abroad, we would be interested in how you think about Boston in comparison to other cities.
David Hacin (DH): Some of the challenges were universal and some unique to this context. Residential
use was new for the district. There was some artist’s housing in the vicinity but not in the district itself.
The developer owned a number of properties here and had a vision for a multi-faceted, multi-use district,
of which this building would be the signature piece. There were a lot of political difficulties, so we hired
a political consultant for the approval process. The biggest difficulty was that the project required a
significant increase of square footage above what it was zoned for to be economically viable.
Scott Thomson (ST): We had to apply for zoning variances for both height and FAR [Floor Area Ratio].
The zoning was in transition. They had an interim overlay zone originally meant to last only five years (but
long overdue) and we were the first ones ‘in the water’ with our project. While there had been others,
they were typical smaller, ad-hoc transformations. Ours was going to be much larger: the first fully code-
compliant new construction, involving comprehensive restoration and seismic upgrading.
DH: It was really two buildings and an open site, most of a whole city block. The block included a fire
station that technically was not part of the project, but ‘de facto’ became so because of the air rights
above it. We had to meet with the fire fighters for the windows that looked over the fire station and we
made upgrades to their building to get their permission. To Scott’s point, the renovation was so extensive
and comprehensive that, financially, it required additional square footage. The site was in a pending
historic district but the historic regulations had not yet gone into effect when we went forward. So we
applied principles from other historic districts in the city to our approach of how the addition should be
done - which was integral to how we explained the project to the community, to city officials, and so forth.

IntAR: What were some of these principles?

DH: Essentially we concluded that the ‘Congress Street view corridor’ (Fig 7) - a very clear and largely
intact piece of period urban architecture – should be preserved and the addition be set back so the
dominant cornice lines and image of Congress Street are maintained. However, at other key vistas, it
was really important to assert the new building identity, including its new components. We saw these
opportunities chiefly down A Street (a cross street) and coming in from downtown over the fire station
(Fig 4, and Fig 5, cross view, with the new addition fully visible). We recognized these vistas as signature
moments and really expressive of what we were trying to do. At the same time, we did view-analyses
that, interestingly, panned out correctly … you actually see what we expected you to see and don’t see
what we predicted you wouldn’t … a lot of people couldn’t believe that that much volume could be
added to the building while still respecting the historic view corridor. There were a lot of folks in the
preservation community who were very skeptical. There were political concerns about precedent setting
… you know, if we built three stories on this building, is everyone in the district then going to want three
stories on theirs, and so forth. Ours was a fairly unique situation, though, because we controlled the
entire block (it was going to be across several buildings) which gave us the flexibility to deal with some
of these issues more artfully.

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2 3

2 aerial view of FP3

3 graphic showing planned additions
4 roof top view of Congress Street
 IntAR: It is surprising how you were able to do a both massive and at the same time very
discrete addition.
ST: Right. We preserved key historic views. We always had in mind a tour guide with a group of tourists
sitting across the street looking at the whole building, and from there they could not see the addition,
but from other views they obviously would.
DH: That was actually very important to us. I was defensive about the notion of not being able to see
the addition because I felt I wanted to show what we were doing, but doing it in ways that showed
we were respectful of preservation while at the same time asserting a new identity for the district and,
even beyond it, for the larger city … and this gets us into the larger discussion about Boston, where the
identity and character of the city is very much a collage of preservation and a new layer of construction, a
new layer of design that expressed the fact that these districts were in constant change and flux over the
years. The interesting thing about residential use is that it tends to be forever. I was just in New York this
past week, and when you are in Midtown and look down over the fragments of the City from the 30s,
40s, 50s, and even 60s, they had to be the residential fragments because those are the buildings owned
by hundreds of individuals and the acquisition and turnover of those properties is quite impossible.

IntAR: When you talk about addition, there really are two additions: the ‘new’ addition on top
and the other one an insert. They address the existing building in different ways and politically
they were probably thought about differently as well.
DH: Yes, but I must say we are quite convinced it was the right thing to do. The ‘infill’ building solved a
lot of problems. It allowed us to have at-grade, handicapped access which was much more complicated
in the older buildings; it allowed the older buildings and their retail areas to really maintain the character
they traditionally had as show rooms and retail spaces. But we are always looking at what the character
of a building is or was. Especially in a missing building that was like a missing tooth. In a district that
was holistically conceived, what was that missing tooth? We looked at images of the building that stood
there before. We went to great pains to make sure that the façade had the same level of depth, shade,
shadow and scale that adjacent buildings would have. A lot of the negative reaction people have to
contemporary architecture in historic districts is not necessarily the contemporary quality of the design
but actually the fact that it is very flat – very thin, or reads in a very different way from the adjacent
buildings. We wanted to make sure that all of those details, including the color and style of the brick,
would play in a very similar way against the other buildings but were nonetheless contemporary. It is
a contemporary interpretation of what had stood on the site. The addition on the top of the building,
rather than just sitting on top, really reaches down, engages, and clips in to the dominant volume of the
block – so that it is not one thing on top of another, or one thing beside another, but they are actually
integrated and reliant on one another – each a part of one thing.
ST: The two buildings we started with were completely separate at one point, completed by separate
firms, separate operations... Obviously, you can now say they are one building but you can also say we
preserved them, and their interiors as well - we preserved the individual buildings that were there and

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 6

5 7

5 view from A Street

6 view from corner Congress Street and A Street
7 ‘Congress Street view corridor’
 feel that this was an important goal. The building that had stood next to the fire house (the ‘missing
tooth’ after it burned down) had in fact predated the other two. The whole district was built ‘to suit’. If
you were a firm, you came there, told them how much space you needed, and they would build it for
you, all done by the same architect. There were two architects who built all the buildings over a period
of years. The block we were on progressed historically, starting with the firehouse and moving eastward.
We wanted our building to read as three facades from the street which had to relate to one other in a
meaningful way. For example, the first building had a progression of three windows, the second had one
of four, and in the missing one we intentionally made it five. We thus tried to subtly link the buildings
through this pattern and rhythm rather than literally trying to unite them physically. The rooftop is in
some sense an ‘other’ thing.
DH: Regarding the special rhythm of windows of the new building, our inside joke was the lower
portion was classical music and the upper portion akin to jazz. There is a similarity in the design of the
new addition on top because we expressly intended to convey modernity and transformation. About
this interesting issue of the whole vs. its parts: Boston, as an older city, has a fine grain and a scale that
people find very human and attractive -- very ‘European’ for lack of a better word. But the pressure of
modern development is such that its size and scale is so much larger than the incremental development
that has traditionally happened in the city. How larger development gets inserted into a city with a very
fine grained fabric has always been, and will always be, a relatively difficult problem to solve. This project
was interesting because it really is quite large but it is broken down visually in terms of how pedestrians
see it – they can see the building as three buildings or as one. It reads at a different scale than what it
actually is, which helps it fit in with the district.
ST: For me the irony of preservation is that the very forces that now want to have a large block in a
single building are the same forces that, in their day, created these buildings. This area, in particular,
was a purely speculative venture by private money. When you look down A Street you see how our two
buildings, below the addition, come together in a way that had nothing to do with aligning with the
cross street. They just built it as requested – which is part of the charm of this district. What we tried to
do was create a financially viable building that preserves that kind of value and does not lose that energy.

IntAR: You are saying it actually has a hybrid nature. It still has the characteristics of what it
appears as but has another nature too.
ST: Yes, it is a ‘both/and’ building. If you compare that to tearing the buildings down and rebuilding a
similar building with three facades that are suggestive of the three buildings that were once there – you
could say our building is no better - but I think what we did has more authenticity.
DH: Yes, we’ve done projects where we had to retain the facades only – there is something more satisfying
about a project where the buildings themselves were preserved and adaptively reused, admittedly, in
part, through gymnastics. But these are the real buildings that are still there, not just an illustration
or a façade or a suggestion of what might have been or once was. They really are being reused. But,
back to the point of the Boston/New York contrast -- it was interesting for me to contrast how Central
Park West is a preserved row of buildings and, of course, a historic district, whereas Midtown is really

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11
A B C D E F G G H

Terrace Glass Railing ACM Panel Wall Cladding In Screen Wall Beyond, SIM To Divider Walls At
Well, TYP Terraces [Wood Clad on Outer Surface Only]

Exterior Ships Ladder

Cooling Tower SIM To Det B1/A502

2HR Rated Ceiling

17'-2"

15'-6"

15'-6"

12'-0"
21 R

Fresh Air Supply Fans

12'-0"

12'-0"

12'-0"

12'-0"
21 R

21 R

7'-10" 7'-10"

9'-0" MIN Under Ducts

13'-0"

13'-0"
23 R

23 R
13'-0"

13'-0"
12'-0"

12'-0"

12'-0"

12'-0"
21 R

21 R
74'-71 2" Travel
8'-0"

86'-13 4" Travel

12'-0"

12'-0"
12'-0"

12'-0"
21 R

21 R
8'-0"

Fresh Air
12'-0"

12'-0"

12'-0"

12'-0"

Supply
21 R

21 R
8'-6"

8'-0"

13'-71 2"

13'-71 2"
24 R

24 R
13'-71 2"

13'-71 2"

Residential
Lobby See A600's

New Window
Commercial
Space
± 5'-43 4"
10 R

11'-61 4"

New Sidewalk
11'-61 4" Pit
17 R

11'-61 4"

11'-61 4"

Commercial Space
20 R
± 6'-11 2"
11 R

5'-6" Pit

9
12

8 framing of roof top addition

9 core steel erection
10 satellite view during construction
11 graphic showing new piling and core hole cutout in red over historical drawing
12 longitudinal section showing old and new piling
 a more speculative area where a building can come down and a bigger one built on the same site.
Boston is a different city than New York. New York may be a more purely capitalist expression of real
estate transformation, where the highest and best or most profitable use of a site is what ultimately is
constantly transforming the city. Once a building or a block has run its course there is not much romance
about preserving it except for certain very particular districts that happen to be residential, because that’s
where people live and the political will for preservation is. In Boston, the whole identity of the city is
collectively more tied up with its scale, its layers of history, and with being able to read the revolutions of
the 1700s and, more specifically, the 1800s and 1900s -- each decade and each generation of evolution
– and that’s what makes it a unique place and gives it a different identity from a city like New York and
even from Europe. Why? Because Europe really has these very preserved downtown districts and then
new business districts are being built outside or separately from these older districts, like in Paris. Boston
is kind of a crazy hybrid – where there is a bit of a capitalist American city where things are changing
but, also this sort of romance about our identity and the real care for preservation and adaptive reuse. It
is an interesting kind of hybrid, neither one nor the other.

IntAR: Can you think of another American city comparable to Boston?

DH: I think San Francisco is a bit like that. That comparison is made frequently. Chicago is more like
New York. There are monuments that are preserved. But the notion of preserving districts is really not
self evident.
The landmarks situation in New York is this: is that building a landmark?; if it is, then we keep it; if its
not, then we can replace it. Cities like Boston or San Francisco are really fabric cities. It is the fabric more
than individual buildings that make the city. In Boston people always complain that there is not enough
striking, monumental architecture. I think to some extent that is true but on the other hand Boston has
a more beautiful fabric than most American cities.

IntAR: Going back to the question of what you preserve. Usually it is stones and windows, but
in this case it is much bigger. It includes the whole block which, in turn, is part of the bigger
fabric. You talk about views from this street and that street but is it not really about some
layers of memory, e.g. of people who have worked in the area once and are experiencing it
now, in a relapse of time, of memory?
DH: Yes, if you want to walk into a restaurant e.g., you walk up the stairs, you walk through a foyer,
you go up a little staircase to a restaurant - that’s because the building has depth, is alive. It is not like
you just walk through some sort of a portal into another world. You really are inhabiting the original,
authentic building.

IntAR: In the rear there was this beautiful awkward column that nobody would put there, in
this beautiful awkwardness.
DH: One of the really interesting things about the building is the technique of feathering new columns
through the older structure and having the old columns and the new columns co-exist side by side.

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13 14

13 14

15

13 Terrasse of a living unit

14 living unit
15 lobby area
 The old columns in wood; the new columns in steel, but on a slipped grid (Fig 11, 12). They had to be,
because the grids couldn’t overlap. At first it bothered me that things didn’t align – you know, architects
want everything to align – but in fact it is one of the most revealing moments about the building where
you really understand that there are these two different structures that are inhabiting the same place
at the same time and they interact with one another in an interesting way. We also had to seriously
reinforce the brick walls of the building. It is built on fill and the area is in a significant seismic zone –
which most people don’t realize about Boston – it is in a quieter area in terms of frequency of seismic
events but it has the potential to be cataclysmic…
ST: … So that’s the challenge. Can you introduce a new thing and can it inhabit the same space without
taking out the former interior.

IntAR: When you said the columns interact … this almost creates a story, extending the idea
of preservation as a narrative, by having a new system which behaves different from the old
system …
ST: The new structural system was dependent on the old one. There is a rhythm of the beams that
were there, that suggested a module. There was an initial process to understand the rhythms of the old
building and that generated the rhythms of the new building because they had to fit together. It wasn’t
an intervention in the artistic sense of say the rooftop structure in Vienna by COOP Himmelblau, or
others. These works are art …
DH: Very interestingly, some of the strongest opponents to our project were artists, because they viewed
our project in threatening terms – displacement, changing the district … which to them represented
the possibility of evictions. We fortunately didn’t displace artists, and made efforts to incorporate a
gallery and artist’s housing and to do whatever we could to reinforce the arts uses. I’ll never forget one
community meeting where some artist stood up and really just railed on us, and I said, “You have to
understand that this is our art, that architecture is an art. So, when you criticize our art in the terms you
are using, think of me criticizing one of your paintings or one of your works in the same terms. Do it
respectfully.” Your mentioning COOP Himmelblau reminded me of this. Really, a lot of the decisions and
choices that we made, such as the expression of the upper floors, are compositional. They did not just
logically flow from some system. The art of architecture, we like to think, is there as well. This was an
interesting discussion with the community.

IntAR: Did things change from then on?

DH: Yes and no. It took them aback … of course, as architects we think of architecture as an art but a
lot of artists haven’t necessarily made that connection … so that was interesting.
ST: It is an ongoing dialogue. I think the opposition was really from a very small group of organized
people who wanted to protect the area against any change.
DH: I think it was the fear of the unknown. These issues resolved themselves and the building is actually
very well received at this point … Looking back, and to conclude, we take preservation very seriously but
we believe strongly that what is new should be expressed as such. This project illustrates that idea. The

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element of preservation was very rigorous here, down to the very careful replacement of bricks in the existing façade and
so on, and yet very clear about what is new and what is old. The new layer is as meaningful as the old layer.
Thinking back to the period of urban renewal in Boston which was done to ‘save’ the city, with its demolition of the West
End; the building of the elevated highway through downtown; the intended demolition of the South End, which didn’t
happen only because the Feds did not have the funds for the demolition… I think Boston was traumatized by excessive
destruction. It is only now beginning to get to the point where the city is secure enough in the knowledge that its historic
fabric is going to be preserved -- because it has been institutionally preserved -- where it can begin to take risks and add
new architecture, and become more offensive than defensive in its approach to new buildings and new design … but, this
is only because the fear of loss has subsided to a point where people can begin to look forward again.

16 17

Editors note: Drink, Fig. 16 and Sportello, Fig. 17 are the work of C & J Katz Studio, Boston

16 Drink, bar designed by C & J Katz Studio

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17 Sportello, cafe designed by C & J Katz Studio