On the Waterfront

As Boston buries the past, a new wave of design surfaces.

By Charlene Rooke

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Ducking down a side street off Boston’s Downtown Crossing shopping district, skirting the edge of Chinatown, I arrive at the impeccably retro Dainty Dot Hosiery Building feeling like I’ve travelled through time. Until recently, this area was an urban wasteland, shadowed since 1959 by an elevated highway. Today it borders a brand-new scythe of green space – reclaimed land from the Big Dig, which over the last decade removed a massive elevated highway and replaced it with underground traffic tunnels.

A vibrant orange window banner beckons me down Kingston Street to the Vessel design store. Curvy modern tableware and furniture items (the company is best known for its ingenious Popsicle-reminiscent cordless Candela lamps) flesh out the high-ceilinged vintage-warehouse bones of the space. Peeking behind a partition, I can see a studio and busy operators taking phone orders in the back.

“You can smell the ocean today,” says Stéfane Barbeau, one of two Canadian founders of Vessel as we emerge from the building a few minutes later. As we set off on a walk of the neighbourhood, the irony of his comment hits me: From most of downtown Boston – even here, just a stone’s throw from the Inner Harbor – you can’t see or smell the waterfront for which Boston (think Tea Party) is traditionally known.

Vessel co-founder Duane Smith explains that architects and photographers are neighbours in their building, many of them installed in the last couple of years as the Central Artery was dismantled and the area made habitable again. “[The Big Dig] has opened up some streets that have been closed for a long time,” Smith says.

Visionaries like the Vessel guys are what drew me here: a hyper-aware new generation of architects and designers who are weaving contemporary threads into Boston’s historic fabric. It’s as if the grand act of civic courage required for Boston to take apart and bury its downtown highway – a $17.6-billion, 15-year project – has been an inspiration for its creative class. “You can see Boston has finally broken through. The shackles have come off,” Charles Renfro of Diller + Scofidio architects said last year, when his firm first began building the striking new glass-box Institute of Contemporary Art in the neglected Seaport district. Hip Dwell magazine even posed the question “Is Boston the Next Bilbao?” comparing the formerly staid New England city to the old Spanish port revitalized by the startling architecture of Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava and others.

“The best cities are the ones where you have the historic as well as the new and zany,” architect Keith Moskow confirms for me. He jumps up and grabs a portfolio to show me a building lobby he designed with a clever pull-down Murphy desk. As Moskow darts through the office, pointing out project models and explaining wild conceptual designs (like an innovative sidewalk shelter and an elevator-style car park), I see the link to his work: It’s fluid, mobile and kinetic, like Moskow himself.

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