Marcel Erminy Studio_606_Spring 02010 Texas A&M University College of Architecture
132 Ipswitch/Boston, Massachusetts
introduction/Propose a mixed use building within the famous Fenway neighborhood in Boston. The program consisted of a 45 room hotel that caters to the visiting baseball team across the street at Fenway Park, as well as a branch of the Boston Ballet School, retail space, and a large green roof serving as a community garden.
context/The Fenway neighborhood is filled with opportunity. Universities surround the area, and two high schools (one for students engaged in performing arts) adjoin the site. Young residents are the majority in the neighborhood, and the Fenway Park baseball stadium provides the area with a unique vibrancy. The roof top garden echoes the public-private gardens found at the Victory Gardens of Back Bay Fens Park. A triangular surface parking lot converts into an open public plaza at the north end of Fenway Park, adjacent to 132 Ipswich.
images/Colors: hotel (yellow), boston ballet school (green), area needed to grow food for one person annually (blue), retail and restaurant space (magenta), garden space (black).
diagram/Program functions and space requirements were realized after a study of the surrounding neighborhood and urban landscape. In order to provide sunlight to the roof garden, as well as maximizing its surface and growing potential, the program was placed below the garden. However, this provided little opportunity for all programs to interact with the garden, and allowed for little interaction between the street and the garden. The hotel was then extracted into a tower at the north end of the site, giving rooms a view out over the city, garden, and stadium. A restaurant sits at the moment where the hotel tower touches the garden, creating a place where the user can sit and eat while looking into the urban garden where the vegetables and spices were grown. In order to bring the garden and the street together, the corner of the garden pushes down creating a scalable hill for pedestrians to enter the community garden. The roof garden’s connection with the street happens at the southern end of the site where there is the least amount of direct sunlight (and therefore the least growing potential) and directly across the street from the new public plaza.
