| Architects build bridge between theory, practice
By James McCown, Globe Correspondent, 6/12/2004 For architects who have spent the last three decades in the rarefied world of design theory and academia, Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti are no strangers to groundbreakings and ribbon-cuttings. Among their current Boston projects: Atelier | 505, Druker Co.'s luxury housing complex, nearing completion in the South End. Massachusetts Port Authority's South Boston Maritime Park, under construction. Dewey Square, a master plan adjacent to South Station, under gradual implementation. An addition to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, also under construction. These commissions follow on the heels of the architects' graduate dormitory for Harvard at One Western Avenue in Allston, and the Allston Branch of the Boston Public Library, the latter building lauded last year by the Boston Society of Architects with its Harleston Parker Medal, one of its highest honors. "When we arrived in Boston in the 1970s, there was no work, so all we did was teach and theorize," said Machado, who next month will assume the chairmanship of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard. "Now, I guess we're making up for it." Far from Boston, their projects include renovations and an addition to the Getty Villa and Museum in California, and university projects in Arkansas, Arizona, and Beirut. Silvetti, who stepped down as chairman of the Department of Architecture at Harvard in 2002, continues to hold a professorship there. The two Buenos Aires-born architects, both 62 and both life and business partners, began their Boston practice in the 1970s in the basement of their Back Bay home. In the mid-1980s, they hung their shingle from a loft space on Harrison Avenue under the name Machado and Silvetti Associates Inc. By then, they had gained a reputation as theorists willing to take on the modernist traditions that had held sway, at Harvard and in Boston, since the 1940s. The firm employs about 40 people. "When I arrived here, I was an oddity," Silvetti said. "I took advantage of tremendous change and upheaval within the profession by challenging and questioning the way architects were thinking about form and buildings." George Thrush, chairman of the Department of Architecture at Northeastern University, said Machado and Silvetti were "especially intellectually lively" at an important point in 20th century architecture. "It was the '70s, and instead of being involved in polemics and politics, they insisted on a focus on form and aesthetics, about the way buildings look and how they work in cities," Thrush said. Atelier | 505 in the South End, while undergoing the usual neighborhood review process, has faced little opposition, which Machado attributes in part to the building's massing. "You can take a large structure and make it look smaller by breaking it into an aggregation of four different buildings," he explained. At Atelier, those components are a main central section, a low-rise row of town houses along Warren Street, a tall "tower" structure at the corner of Berkeley and Tremont streets, and a "pavilion" that resembles a work of origami. It connects the complex to the adjacent Boston Center for the Arts. "I'd been enamored of the large atelier windows I'd seen in Paris and in Aix-en-Provence, where I visited Cezanne's studio," said Ron Druker, president of Druker Co., the developer of Atelier | 505 and a former faculty member at the Harvard Design School, where he met Machado and Silvetti while teaching a course in real estate development. "Rodolfo and Jorge were able to interpret this such that it spoke to the sophistication of the market we were going after," Druker said. He added that the brisk sales of the condominiums, which range from $600,000 to $2.75 million, have been "beyond my wildest dreams." While Druker is Machado and Silvetti Associates' first major commercial client, Machado is more than willing to put aside his theorizing to pursue one of his last unfulfilled desires as an architect: to design a skyscraper. "It's a typical immigrant's fantasy," he acknowledged. "Come to the United States and build a tall building." This story ran on page D3 of the Boston Globe on 6/12/2004.
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