News
Transforming The Globe
May 12, 2010
| Yesterday, Chan Krieger Sieniewicz NBBJ?s Alex Krieger and Tom Sieniewicz discussed with us remaking urban life from Congress St. to Shanghai. But perhaps most impressive: the firm donated $300k in services to build a new Greater Boston Food Bank building. |
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| At their Cambridge office, we snapped Chris Bennett, Drew Kane and Alex talking about Shanghai where Alex re-designed the Bund, a waterfront promenade with ornate 1900?s buildings on one side and the newest skyscrapers in Pudong on the other. Where there were ten lanes of parkway, 6 lanes were depressed, 4 stayed above ground, the Bund was widened and landscaped to create 2k linear feet of lavish parks. A few weeks ago, Alex watched 20k workers race to complete the two years of construction for the May 1 opening of the Expo. ?I couldn't believe it,? he said. Indeed, China?s urbanization is so fast, he says 300M people will migrate to its cities in the next 15 years. |
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| We found Tom in a rare moment of respite with colleagues Alice Carey and Pablo Licari. They?ve been busy reconfiguring the 4-acre site of the hulking Congress Street Garage into a $1.2B, 3.5M SF complex of offices, housing, hotel and transit. The planning objective: reconnect to the urban fabric Congress and Canal streets, long dead-ended by the brutalist home for 2300 cars. Now going through permitting, the development team of The Lewis Trust, the NEBF, and HYM Investment Group expect the new towers to draw tenants away from older Financial District buildings. Tom says ?When it happens, it will be an impressive civic gesture; one of the largest redevelopment projects in Boston.? |
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| In another civic gesture, Tom, designed a flashy 117k SF distribution center for the Greater Boston Food Bank overlooking I-93. The new green building holds 4 times more food than the old one. We snapped him with Patrick Tedesco and Radhika Bagai,holding one of the reflective tabs that make the building shimmer. At night, the Food Bank?s stalk of wheat logo emblazons the side of the building. Tom tells us their aim is to raise awareness that hunger in Eastern Mass. is so pervasive. (Food Bank supplies feed 83k people a week.) He hopes the wheat logo will become another urban myth, like ?I know where Ho Chi Minh?s profile and the wheat symbol are.? |
