We sat down (virtually) with Principal Stefanie Greenfield, AIA, LEED AP, to discuss current renovation projects she’s leading in Boston and Cambridge. Stefanie discusses how she was introduced to the challenge of working with existing spaces, how she developed an appreciation for unique urban settings, and why it’s important to preserve them. CambridgeSeven has several restoration projects in our portfolio, but in this interview, Stefanie gives insight into three very distinct challenges: adaptive reuse of the historic Foundry building in Cambridge, transformations made to the residential high-rise at the Devonshire in downtown Boston, and upcoming improvements to 26 Court Street – a historic public building near Government Center. Each project has a unique story to tell.

Listen to the interview or read the transcript below.

 

Chelsea:

East Berlin may be 4000 miles from East Cambridge but to one local architect, they are intrinsically linked. I’m Chelsea, Marketing Coordinator at CambridgeSeven, and today I’m speaking with principal Stefanie Greenfield about how her early career move to Germany’s capital city still influences her designs today, especially in her approach to thoughtful renovations.

Stefanie, do you first want to give a little bit of background about how you entered the design field?

Stefanie:

Sure! More than 20 years ago, I graduated with a degree in architecture from Washington University in St. Louis and I moved in the middle of a recession to New York City to try to find a job when no one was hiring people. So, in some ways, I always think my career was defined by graduating into a recession and knowing how hard it is to find a job. I worked in New York for over a year, in a very high-end, luxury, interior design firm. The company was Johnson Wanzenberg, but I learned a lot about working with existing conditions, and working in really interesting buildings in New York City, and what could be done internally to buildings. And this was the middle of a recession, so no one was moving around, no one was looking for new jobs. And a friend of mine decided we should move to Berlin, because the streets were paved in gold for architects at that time! There, they were really looking for design architects who came from the United States with a real design mentality, not a technical background.

So I moved to Berlin and it was the most exciting time to be there because they were just rebuilding the whole city. It was right after the wall came down between East and West and the whole city was being rebuilt. I lived there for two years and it really caught my imagination in terms of what rebuilding a city could look like. It was right in the middle of the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) which was the International Architecture Exhibition is a German device for urban engineering, which formed social housing all over Berlin, but they kept the height of the buildings at five stories. So here was a movement to take rebuild an entire historic city, with buildings that could only be five stories high! And what was interesting was how that worked with the fabric of an existing city of old buildings and new buildings, and how all this new architecture could live with old architecture when an urban plan was set in a really meaningful way. So anyway, that’s a long way of saying that that’s how I got interested in historic architecture!

Chelsea:

And did you find any major takeaways in the differences and how Europeans treat preservation and modernization versus how we treat it here?

Stefanie:

Well, I think that you just hit the nail on the head- the Europeans aren’t afraid to be different. They’re not afraid to show a new intervention next to an old historic building and make that tension between new and old really exciting; they celebrate it because the whole fabric is old. So anytime you build new, it should look different. They also refer in a lot of ways to their landmark structures as “heritage” buildings, and I’ve always loved that term because it suggests a social interaction and a connection to a place that’s made by architecture. I’m interested in that kind of social and community identity with buildings.

So let’s take the Foundry building. In Cambridge, we have this beautiful historic fabric of industrial buildings, and the Foundry was one of those buildings. All around us over the past 10 years, developers have been coming in and building life science high-rise buildings in that community. So in East Cambridge the residents came up to build a community together and just said, “We need a place of our own in East Cambridge, that’s not about high-rise buildings. It’s not about modern interventions, but we want to take this Foundry building and make it our own community center.” They really rallied around that notion and they got City of Cambridge to buy in and support them and make it this cultural Art Center and I’m really excited and curious to see it once it’s built up. I have a prediction that most people are going to want to be in our little yard next to the community center as opposed to being in big, anonymous outdoor spaces where the scale of the human to the building is so large; they’re going to seek out this more intimate space at the Foundry building.

Chelsea:

I’m wondering – why was it so important for the City of Cambridge to reuse the Foundry building as opposed to building something new?

Stefanie:

That’s a great question, because it’s twofold. There is a commitment about social fabric, that the City of Cambridge has. They’re so savvy and they really understand that to make place and to make community you do have to celebrate this fabric. They committed early on to keeping the structure even though it’s always more expensive to really restore something back to what it was and then to add a new one. But I think that Cambridge, of all communities, really understands that to keep their heritage they have to celebrate it. I think they’re just a very sophisticated client that way.

Chelsea:

Do you find that you are instilling any ideas or lessons learned from Germany or the Europeans? Are you into the Foundry or into any other projects you have?

Stefanie:

You know, I think you’re always learning from your client. You’re always learning from your teammates, your consultants, your community. When we started the project, there was a leadership voice from the City of Cambridge, Taha Jennings who said to us, “Anyone who walks into the Foundry should feel like they’re home and that they’re welcome here.” And we took that comment really to heart in terms of how we would open up the building and create a kind of community hall in the old Foundry. There was a lot of conversation about how the building would function and I think CambridgeSeven really educated the group that in order to feel welcome, you have to feel architecturally like you’re in a community space – it should feel warm and inviting. But there also should be places you can go where there’s a real reception desk, and there’s a cafe, and there’s windows into all these really exciting workshops so people can navigate naturally through the architecture, as opposed to needing big signs that tell you where to go. So we tried to do it in two ways: one is architecturally to open up and invite people in and second is creating a welcoming experience through adjacencies of programmatic elements.

Chelsea:

So there’s the restoration and adaptive reuse of existing Foundry building. But, there’s also an addition looks dramatically different than what’s there. So, is there an interplay between the modernization and the preservation there?

Stefanie:

Yes! The Foundry building had been this big, wide-open space with a dirt floor where people came in and moved molten ore and minerals through open fires. So, we wanted to keep and preserve the structure and the integrity of the building but we also had to add office space, two means of egress, an elevator, and a transformer vault. So, we created a new addition that could house all the modern-day uses of the building. We didn’t want to just put something against the old brick building. We didn’t want to put a brick edition against it. We wanted something new and celebrate story. We came up with a kind of narrative around the metals and the metallurgy that was made in the building and we use that story to talk about how to introduce a new architecture.

This new envelope was made with a metallic bronze-colored panel and an envelope and that was designed to harken back to the kinds of metals that were used in the building. Then, we created a very sculptural entry portal so it looked like we were inserting something new into the old facade. And we did that for two reasons: one, obviously, to welcome people in and to create a new sign for the building, but the building is tucked away in a very inopportune way; you can’t really see the building from Third Avenue. So we wanted this bright, sculptural entry portal to visually capture you when you’re coming down Third Avenue.

I think in a lot of the work we’re doing – whether it’s municipal work like 26 Court Street, a fire station, or a youth center – we always bring in a level of the hospitality spirit in the way we think about arrival and being gracious and letting someone into a municipal building. We want to always bring in that level of hospitality.

Chelsea:

You also instill a lot of your hospitality expertise into private residential spaces to like the renovations that we’ve been doing at One Devonshire in downtown Boston. That was a complete existing building and you’ve had to go through several phases of renovations to the private spaces and the public spaces. So can you talk a little bit about the challenges that come with that kind of project as opposed to a new build?

Stefanie:

Yeah, it’s a great question the way you posed it because I’m interested in how to keep the fabric of a city. The Devonshire is on the same block as 26 Court Street but they are two different stories that make up the city as a collection of buildings. When we go into renovate a project like Devonshire, we look at the fact that this was the first high-rise residential building in downtown Boston back in the day. Now you see big tall floor-to-ceiling-glass buildings everywhere. But back then, this was a New York developer who came to Boston and made their mark here. So how do you restore that? And what’s that story? When we looked at the building closely, everything was about punched windows. It wasn’t big floor-to-ceiling glass, like we did at Four Seasons One Dalton or 30 Dalton. These were punched openings! And what it made me think about was, in some ways, the old Boston Salon, the brownstones in Back Bay where you have a system of rooms and the rooms have four walls and a punched window. And there’s lots of places to put furniture; when everything’s open, it’s much more difficult. So, we tried to capitalize on the notion that this was one of the grande dame buildings of Boston. Now how could we infuse a little more luxury into it?

We brought back the theme of the salon with theme of blues and whites and patterns and textures and bronze materials. We used that to layer on a little bit of luxury. It’s funny how with a few very simple moves, you can do something really dramatic! The whole amenity space had no windows and the owner asked us to create a business center and a lounge and  vibrant community spaces with no windows! So, we had to really capitalize on interesting architectural tricks like – if there is a sliver of a window, can we put a mirror next to it? Can we create really dark spaces in contrast to really light spaces? That’s why you see these rooms that are really deep navy blue contrasted with a really bright white space with a  wood interior -that was really conscious.

Chelsea:

What can you tell us about the work that’s about to happen at 26 Court Street? That’s a very different type of building than the Foundry or Devonshire.

Stefanie:

Yeah, that is a fantastic building and a really neat story.

It’s been in the hands of the city the longest with multiple uses and now it’s going through its, I think, fourth big change. But the commitment to preservation is what’s most exciting because it’s a great old building. So what do you do there? Right now, you go into that building and it’s all closed off. Here’s a community building for the city of Boston that feels unfriendly right now. There’s no accessible entry. Everything’s very dark. There’s not a lot of natural light in the lobby space. The outdoor plaza has deferred maintenance. For us, the excitement is, “How can we take a municipal building and make it feel open and inviting and like a real showpiece for the city?” It doesn’t mean that every building has to have a café in order to feel welcoming; you can make a big public room that feels inviting, where the public can sit and wait for a meeting or use a public bathroom or meet a friend. And you can do that in a safe and responsible way. I think with COVID, there’s going to be a whole new series of challenges that we’re going to have to look at in terms of access to the building, who gets to come and move through the building a certain way, and what floors they can access. I know we’ll figure out a way to resolve it responsibly.

Chelsea:

I guess the final question that I have, that sums up everything we’re talking about is – how do you think cities benefit from adapting existing spaces?

Stefanie:

Well, think about your favorite places to go. In the storytelling in your head, probably many of your favorite places are places that are unique, right? You don’t go to Boston to go to Starbucks! You go to Boston to experience the Paul Revere house, Fanueil Hall, the brick sidewalks, or the fabric and cacophony of different textures of the Old City. I think we’ve all learned in the past 50 years that tearing down a neighborhood is not the way to build cities. It’s not sustainable. It’s not good for our community. I think we’re seeing on so many levels that the most important reasons for conservation is the protection of community identity and that the loss of a historic building is the loss of social fabric.

So, I do feel passionate about understanding what is indigenous to a community. And if it is through that historic building, what do we celebrate about that building? And then what can we augment and create new to enhance it? There’s two things; first, we look at the historic fabric and the historic structure, and we analyze what’s unique about it and what we should celebrate; secondly, what do we need that’s new that could be put in conversation with the? For me, that’s what’s exciting. That’s what I like to do.