CREDIT: D. Harney

CAPTION: The Boston Architectural College’s Newbury Street building is behind and across Alley 444 from its new purchase, the former ICA building that was originally used as a police station.


While the Institute of Contemporary Art has been in the news during the last few weeks because of its dramatic new waterfront building, its former Back Bay home at 955 Boylston Street has been charting its own course.

On January 3, the Boston Architectural College bought the 25,000-plus-square-foot building, built as a police station in 1886 in the Richardson Romanesque Revival style, for $7.2 million. The seller, real estate firm Samuels and Associates, also located on Boylston Street, bought it from the ICA after the arts organization started construction on its new building. MassDevelopment, the state agency that provides seed money for economic development, provided the proceeds from more than $12 million in tax-exempt bonds to assist in the purchase.

955 Boylston will expand by about 25 percent the space the college occupies, said Ted Landsmark, the BAC’s president. Its current building at 320 Newbury Street is located behind the former ICA building and across Alley 444. It also occupies two floors in the building housing Urban Outfitters at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Newbury Street.

Landsmark said the purchase will allow the college to expand both its on-campus and online offerings. On campus it enrolls about 1,000 students in architecture, landscape architecture, interior design and continuing education and certificate programs. The architecture students work in 300 design firms during the day and take courses at night, enabling them to finish their course work and become licensed in about seven years.

The BAC is the only design school with a master’s degree program entirely online, Landsmark said. The program is small now, with only 13 students, but Landsmark believes it will grow.

The purchase will also be a unique learning opportunity for BAC students, who along with faculty and other advisors will do the bulk of the space planning and design for the newly configured campus. “They will be able to engage in the kind of real-world campus planning that wouldn’t ordinarily exist for a design college,” Landsmark said.

Students have already begun to use the building, but plans for its use and any reconfiguration of the college’s other buildings will wait until May, 2008. At that time the American Institute of Architects will hold its annual convention in Boston, and students will present their planning and design work to that audience.

Landsmark believes the ideas will be intriguing, since the era of large rooms filled with drafting tables is over. Rather, he said, the question will be “how would one configure a campus for a profession that is increasingly globalized and based in technology?”

The BAC has long been a part of the Back Bay. Founded in 1889 as the Boston Architectural Club, it became the Boston Architectural Center in the 1940s and built its distinctive “brutalist” style building at the corner of Hereford and Newbury streets in the mid-1960s. The school changed its name to the Boston Architectural College last July to better reflect its role as a degree-granting institution and to recognize the level of work its students achieved.

credit: Penny Cherubino
caption: The management at 416 Marlborough Street has put unclaimed phonebooks out for recycling.





Last week piles of telephone directories appeared on the front steps of Back Bay buildings. The deliveries, from two different publishers, offered residents copies of Verizon White Pages, Verizon Yellow Pages and the competing Yellow Book.

The three books contain 4,868 pages, weigh 10 pounds, and stack 6 inches high. New phone books produce a lot of paper for the city’s public works department to process. “We do urge people to recycle. Your older phone books can be recycled with paper in your regular recycling pickup,” said Jennifer Mehigan, a spokeswoman for Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

Recylcing old phone books is not the only issue. With phone numbers available on the internet, some residents don’t use phone books. Brand-new directories, still in their plastic wrappers, made their way from front steps to blue recycling bins this week.

While local statistics were not available, nationally, 640,000 tons of phone books enter the waste stream each year. Of these, “Only 18 percent are recycled.” said Scott Cassel, executive director of the Product Stewardship Institute — a national, nonprofit organization headquartered on Newbury Street, and dedicated to reducing the health and environmental impacts of consumer products.

“The manufacturers of the phone books are distributing these, even when people don’t want them. Like many products they end up on local governments’ doorsteps… and it’s up to the local government to either recycle or dispose of these phone books,” Cassel said.

Towns like Chelmsford have passed ordinances that allow residents to opt out of directory deliveries. In other locales, CD-rom versions are available as an alternative to printed copies.

Fresh phone books are welcome in other homes. “I use the Internet for out-of-town numbers, but I still use the phone book for anything that’s local. Maybe it’s generational, but I feel I have to have one in the house,” said Commonwealth Avenue resident Pauline Bilsky.

While she took a full set of books, Bilsky did have a concern with the number of directories left in her foyer. “We have only six units in this building, and there must have been a dozen sets of phone books delivered. It’s a huge waste.” She felt that publishers should be responsible for returning to collect the excess and for disposing of them in a responsible manner.

Generational preferences aside, these are not your grandmother’s phone books. The redesign of this year’s Yellow Pages was the result of research into what consumers want from the publication, according to Andy Shane, spokesman for Idearc Media Corp., publisher of the Verizon print directories.

Over the years, publishers have added incentives, like coupons, to make the directories more attractive to both advertisers and consumers. The first coupon in the new Yellow Pages is for Marlborough Street’s Stanhope Framers. “We’ve had great success with coupons with Verizon,” said owner David Murphy. He has been buying yellow page advertising since he founded the company 35 years ago and carefully tracks how people come to his business. “Number one is word-of-mouth. Number two is Verizon Yellow Pages.”

Besides coupons, the new publications contain a community magazine, area maps, a health and wellness guide and restaurant menus.

State Representative Marty Walz and co-sponsor Byron Rushing, working closely with President of the Boston Public Library Bernard Margolis, filed legislation last week that would rename the Copley T Station Copley/BPL Station to reflect the presence of the institution in that area.

“This would give the library a level of visibility that it does not have today,” said Walz. “It is one of the oldest and most important libraries in the country.”

Margolis has asked the MBTA to consider the change several times since coming to Boston and his position at the BPL ten years ago. “One of the most visible architectural elements of Copley Square is … this building,” said Margolis. “Wouldn’t it be appropriate to include it in some way in the name of the stop?”

But, Margolis’ requests have always been turned down by the T. “Historically the response has been that it is too costly to change the signage in the station,” he said.

Frustrated, Margolis approached Walz and the mayor, who both support the name change, about legislative action. “The T is unresponsive,” said Walz. “The only alternative is to do it through legislation. It seems like a perfectly reasonable request.”

With a complete station renovation about to get underway, Walz and Margolis felt this was a good time to file the bill. All the station’s signs will be replaced anyway. “Clearly [cost] isn’t the case now, because the station is being redesigned,” said Margolis.

Walz also argued that with the move of the ICA, the Hynes/ICA stop will also have to be changed now.

The T disagrees. “The MBTA will not entertain renaming that station,” said spokesperson Lydia Rivera. “It is a costly effort and would be confusing to our customers.”

Margolis hoped the name change would lessen confusion for out-of-towners looking to visit the BPL. “The precedent is very clear that the T recognizes the importance of naming stops for institutions like the MFA, the Museum of Science, MIT and Symphony,” he said.

Riders often refer to the stop as “the library stop,” he said. “It is in the popular parlance; this is just formalizing that,” said Margolis.

The bill will be sent to committee and have a public hearing no later than March of 2008, said Walz.

credit: D. Harney

Steven Ruel, a student at the Berklee College of Music, practiced his trade in the Public Garden last week.

Get moving

We’re doing a fitness issue partly because getting fit is a typical New Year’s resolution that hasn’t yet been forgotten.

We’re also doing it because we have become intrigued by all the new ways to get or keep fit.

It used to be walking, running, skiing, swimming dancing, skating and biking, perhaps with a little yoga thrown in. Then about 25 years ago aerobics entered the scene, setting exercise to music in a dance-like fashion that wasn’t really dance. Fitness clubs began. Eleven years ago when a woman billing herself as a private trainer came to our oldest newspaper for advertising, no one knew what she was talking about.

There are now as many ways to enjoy exercise as there are parts of the body. You can participate in Pilates and Gyrotonics sessions. In the dance category there are belly dancing, pole dancing, swing dancing, throws, releases, aerials, salsa, trampoline or strip tease.

Pretend you’re a marine with bootcamps where you get a good workout and a lot of yelling.

You can spin, box, step, roll, kick or sculpt. Some activities are traditional; some are helped along by fantasy. Group or individual activities — there are a lot of ways to get moving.

Bring it on

The strange, warm weather that has encouraged trees to bud and blossom is scary. We don’t want global warming. We want snow and ice and all the other inconveniences that make New England perfect for New Englanders. This week was more like January ought to be. We’re hoping for even more cold.

A good idea

Some ideas won’t change the world, but they are good ones anyway. State Representative Marty Walz proposes that the MBTA change the name of the Copley T station to incorporate the name of the Boston Public Library.

There is a lot of precedent for this in the T. On the MBTA web site, the Hynes Convention Center/ICA station still identifies two destinations even though one of them is long gone. Charles was changed a few years ago to incorporate Massachusetts General Hospital.

It is ironic that the new station would be called by the name of the library neighborhood leaders fought so futilely to protect from architectural encroachment. But perhaps that is the perfect outcome.