ArchitectureBoston: "Graphic Essay: The Innovative Client"
David Clem and Lyme Properties are featured in the November/December 2007 edition of ArchitectureBoston, which showcases their focus on excellent architectural work at Kendall Square. The full article can be downloaded here.
David Clem may have grown up in Texas, but Cambridge is where his heart is. He moved there in 1971 to attend MIT’s urban studies and planning school, got interested in community development, was elected to the city council at age 24, and in later years became a key player in the transformation of vacant manufacturing sites, including One Kendall Square. When in 1998 his firm, Lyme Properties, purchased a contaminated, 10-acre set of parking lots that was formerly home to a coal-gas manufacturing plant on Third Street in Kendall Square, he felt strongly that the area deserved top-quality architecture and urban design.
The challenge was to take a place of chain-link fences and parking lots, at the foot of the Longfellow Bridge and across from the Red Line MBTA station, and make it lively, useful, and interesting, while at the same time accommodating 1.3 million square feet of new office, commercial, and life-sciences laboratory space. So Clem decided to hold a series of design competitions for the multiple buildings and landscape opportunities at the site, today known simply as Kendall Square and home to the famously green, platinum LEED-rated Genzyme headquarters. The competitions, similar to those used in the Canary Wharf redevelopment in London, would stir creativity and innovation, Clem believed.
“Our canvas was clean,” Clem said of what might be described as the Cambridge version of Boston’s Fan Pier.“ And I was intent on doing something in Cambridge that was not red brick with punched windows.”
The first step was convincing Cambridge officials to let Lyme apply its own design-review standards instead of the city’s. Then Clem hired Ken Greenberg of Toronto-based Urban Strategies to do the master plan. With help from colleague Dan Winny AIA, the Lyme team winnowed firms to a handful of finalists for each building, and paid a modest stipend and travel expenses to have them make presentations.
Several things happened, Clem said. Firms came calling from around the world, and were surprised and grateful that a developer was interested in urban design. The winners outdid themselves because their peers were working on the next site over. “It was something like assembling an all-star team of players. They all wanted to do their best,” Clem said. And some candidates flagged things the development team hadn’t thought about.
“If we were working in a vacuum, we couldn’t achieve this. The competition made us a better developer and made us understand our site.”
Independent juries were selected for each building, though Lyme stayed active in the process. This was helpful when a jury selected Steven Ehrlich Architects, who had not designed a lab before, for 675 West Kendall Street, home to Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Ehrlich was matched with local firm Symmes, Maini&McKee.“We made sure it was a design team that meshed,” Clem said.
The Lyme team chose Anshen + Allen (of San Francisco) for 650 East Kendall Street (now under construction) and Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner (Germany and LA) for 500 Kendall Street (the Genzyme headquarters). Other firms tapped were Childs Bertman Tseckares (Boston) for 100 Kendall Street (housing and a hotel), Architects Alliance (Toronto) for 450 Kendall Street (housing), and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (NewYork/ Cambridge) for the landscape features, including a skating rink, plaza, and park that is home to concerts and a farmer’s market, and gardens beside the Broad Canal.“I’m a convert to the design-competition approach. But the competition doesn’t mean anything unless you implement it and build it,” Clem said.
“I think great architecture requires a great client, someone who is willing to pay more for quality and stick with it.” The rise of out-of-state real estate investment trusts and changes in development financing, he said, means that some prominent projects may not be as driven by a sense of civic responsibility.“ I see that sensitivity being lost.”
Clem won’t be running a new competition anytime soon, however. Lyme Properties has completed and sold its Kendall Square properties, with the exception of 585 Kendall Street (the Constellation Center, Glenn KnicKrehm’s performing-arts venue, designed by The Stubbins Associates [now KlingStubbins]). Clem himself is taking a break from the development business for the foreseeable future. “I’m just taking a breather,” he said, “and contemplating the next step.”
Anthony Flint is a Boston-based writer and director of public affairs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think-tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts.