News
TOP 100: ELKUS MANFREDI
April 14, 2010
| Elkus Manfredi is a cartographer?s nightmare—unharnessed by state boundaries. The architecture, planning, and interior design firm has influenced Cambridge labs, NYC's Columbus Circle, and Chicago's Miracle Mile. Now, it's reconfiguring a college campus in California and restoring a historic hotel in Wisconsin. | |
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| We snapped Mark Sardegna, Maria Schroeder, David Manfredi, and Deron Granville strategizing on the master plan to add student beds, academic facilities, parking, and a hotel on a 35-acre site being incorporated into the University of Southern California. USC is growing and transforming into a residential campus, a change aimed at catapulting it into top 20 university ranks. David calls it ?exceptional to be able to plan such a large site all at once.? The project is now before the city of LA for Specific Plan approval. | |
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| If you get to Madison, WI, in a few years (second honeymoon, anyone?) you'll notice the old Edgewater Hotel on Lake Mendota is bigger; this is the team that came up with the design. Warren VanWees, David, Clifford Tremblay, and Kevin Leonard are planning for the restoration of the 1940?s Art Moderne building and adding 137 rooms, a spa, a 6k SF ballroom, and a new tower with 360 degree views. They're also creating new public access to the water: a stair, landscaped walkway, public plaza, and lakefront terrace. Not just a building, David says the new hotel (still going through the approval process) will be part of a ?cultural corridor? that runs between the two lakes, Mendota and Menona (those of you who played Carmen Sandiego already knew that). | |
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| Elkus has some home state gigs as well. John Martin, Cindy Finley, and David are preparing the construction documents for National Development's senior housing/retail/office complex soon to be built at the long vacant Grossman?s site on Washington Street in Wellesley Lower Falls. Taking the form of the old mill buildings that once lined this section of the Charles, the three-building senior living village will front Washington Street with 17k SF of retail and 16k SF of offices above. Behind this ?gatehouse? will be one 86-unit independent living building and a 52-unit assisted living residence with a landscaped courtyard between. David tells us it's great to be working on one of few major private ?building projects moving forward in the region.? | |
