Park 151 with CBT

Written By DARYL AVERY SWANSON

Photo credit: © Connie Zhou

The glass walls and ceiling of the entry to Park 151’s gallery-like lobby are clad in dichroic film, which transforms light to appear yellow, orange, pink, green, or purple. A synthesis of the project’s dual design inspirations—science and art.

Design is storytelling in 3D,” explains Vickie Alani, AIA, multi-family residential design expert and Senior Principal at Boston-based CBT. And, when it comes to interpreting and shaping a project for their residential development clients, CBT’s design leadership spans the full life—and story—of a project. Park 151, CBT’s recently completed multi-family tower rising in Cambridge’s newest neighborhood, Cambridge Crossing (CX), is a case in point.

Photo credit: © Jay Burnham Photography

The view south from Park 151 to its neighborhood, the 43-acre Cambridge Crossing, the CBT-master-planned, innovation-centric district rising in East Cambridge.

As master planners of this 43-acre urban village, architects of Park 151’s core-and-shell building, and designers of the interior environments that bring these residences to life, CBT’s signature holistic design role is evident at every scale, strengthening the whole for client, residents, and community.

When Cambridge Crossing’s developer, DivcoWest, chose CBT to design the twenty-story Park 151 inside and out, CBT’s interior designers began close collaboration with CBT’s architects, a creative and functional advantage for the DivcoWest team.

Photo credit: © Connie Zhou

The elevator lobby, on axis with the main lobby entrance, is detailed with perforated metal ceiling panels, diffusing light and adding texture.

Envisioned as an ideal home base for life science and innovation industry professionals, whether connected with the tech and healthcare companies now headquartered there, in nearby Kendall Square, or one of Cambridge’s universities, the tower anchors Cambridge Crossings’ northern edge. As the first multi family residence developed under DivcoWest’s leadership for Cambridge Crossing, the design charge was to create a distinctly special multifamily residence, one that expresses the larger CX vision and connects with its residents.

Photo credit: © Connie Zhou
Dark metal detail is juxtaposed with a colorful, playful lighting cluster in the residents’ mail room.

With these goals in mind, CBT’s interior designers were eager to add a compelling new chapter to the Cambridge Crossing story. Their inspiration? Cambridge’s inherent creative and innovative milieu and the life science community taking root within CX’s mixed-use urban district. Most importantly, the result: A residential building that is at once artfully creative, technologically sophisticated, and architecturally dynamic. Only recently opened, Park 151 is filling quickly with its first residents.

Photo credit: © Connie Zhou
Level three’s spectrum of amenities span quiet library areas to the bar/sports lounge, micro-offices for working-from-home and private dining/kitchen, connecting to the adjacent pool deck, replete with areas for grilling, al fresco movies, and cozy firepit time.

In describing CBT’s process, Alani explains, “With our clients, we start with a ‘beginner’s mind’ — with curiosity, with questions, and without assumptions. Lots of questions! It’s an immersion process. Steeping ourselves in the final resident’s and client’s vision and goals. We ask questions like: who will live here, and why? We try to get at the emotions of the team, asking the unexpected question: If Park 151 were a car, what kind of car would it be? We dig to a deeper understanding of what it will mean to make this building home. And, because it isn’t always easy for folks to talk about design vision, we bring lots of visioning tools to them early on, to help unearth vision, expectations, the special nuances that can result in one-of-a-kind design solutions that exactly fit a project. Our residential design is about creating homes. A home that is tied to its place. And to the lifestyle of the future community who will live here.”

Photo credit: © Connie Zhou

The Lobby is a gallery, quietly allowing the ceiling sculpture space to be the main element with a backdrop of changing color in the vestibule and leasing offices made of dichroic effects.

With the guiding results of this visioning journey, CBT’s designers began to tell Park 151’s story in 3D, using light, color, art, restrained details, and subtle refinement to craft spatial experiences. This begins to unfold with the lobby entrance’s glass-walled vestibule. Its glass walls and ceiling are clad in dichroic film which transforms light to appear yellow, orange, pink, green, or purple. This entry portal channels Cambridge’s creative and scientific communities and the intellectual and innovative natures of prospective residents. Beginning here, one-of-a-kind design elements inspired by art and science surround one, at times subtly, at times vibrantly, always inviting a second look.

Photo credit: © Connie Zhou
The lobby’s original art, the fluid sculpture “Cascade,” was the co-creation of Artists For Humanity’s 3D Design Studio, CBT, DivcoWest, and LCOR.

It was most important to the design team to bring a sense of creative community spirit to the building. A remarkable instance of this was the co-creation of a captivating silver-beaded sculpture that drapes in graceful cloud-like swaths from the lobby ceiling. This room-filling sculpture, “Cascade,” is the collaboration of CBT and Artists for Humanity, the Boston-based program empowering teens through art and design. Inspired by the concept of minute scientific elements creating a whole—think the Milky Way or DNA— Cascade is made of over three miles of hand-crafted chains of steel balls.

Also connected to the theme of creativity, the concept of gallery space providing a quiet backdrop to showcase art inspired the approach to the main lobby and the array of amenity spaces. For each, a cohesive interior is created by the juxtaposition of neutral, crisp wall and floor finishes with jewel-toned carpets, abstract wall art by another regional artist, and distinctive furnishings and custom carpeting.

Photo credit: © Connie Zhou
High-back sofas frame seating areas and add privacy in level three’s co-working and conference space; an asymmetrical, sixty-three-foot custom rug brings joyful color and spatial unity.

Photo credit: © Connie Zhou
Smoked glass gives a bit of privacy to conference rooms, while pendant lights add a sense of movement and visual continuity for the series of meeting areas.

And, to create a unified connection with the building’s exterior, the interiors team accent spaces with dramatic, dark metal edge details that evoke the façade.

Photo credit: © Connie Zhou
Inspired by Park 151’s façade, black metal frames create interior portals.

Photo credit: © Connie Zhou

Unit design reintroduces the wood frame from the building design and the lobby—simple clean lines allow the kitchens to feel like furniture.

On track to achieve Gold-level certification for LEED v4 BD+C and WELL v1 Multi-Family Residential—a probable Massachusetts’ first—the residence offers 468 units ranging from studios, one-, two-, and three-bedrooms and 30,000-square-feet of amenity spaces—from lounges quiet and lively, to co-working rooms and stunning private dining room to enclosed bike parking for 500 bikes—what a place to call home!

 
 

Collaborators

 
 

Click to listen to Designer Monologues - The Podcast on Spotify!

 
DARYL AVERY SWANSON
Previous

Simplisafe with IA Interior Architects
Next

Inside Look as an Independent Rep with McKearney Associates