Image courtesy of Elkus Manfredi Architects
Cambridge-based CarGurus visited approximately 10 potential locations for a new headquarters before settling on one of Boston’s highest-profile development sites.
CEO Jason Trevisan said the online marketplace hopes the new Back Bay offices will be a magnet for in-office work and collaboration. The company, which is headquartered at 2 Canal Park in East Cambridge, currently recommends its approximately 1,000 employees spend 60 percent of their workweek in the office, Trevisan said.
“It’s going to be a statement location and we know that we want to make an environment that draws our employees in, and we thought that is would do that unlike any other building,” Trevisan said.
A “bridging ceremony” held Tuesday reflected progress on the new office-lab building, citizenM hotel and a 520-ton steel and concrete deck above the Massachusetts Turnpike that supports a half-acre civic space and 35,000 square feet of shops and restaurants.
Planning studies between Boston and state officials on bridging the Turnpike with air rights developments from the Fenway to South End date back to the 1990s, but parcel 12 was the first to obtain financing and begin construction since Copley Place in the early 1980s.
For Samuels & Assoc., the project punctuates more than a decade of development in the Fenway that transformed the Boylston Street corridor with new residential high-rises and office buildings.
The Parcel 12 is the highest-profile one to date, seen by millions of motorists driving in and out of Boston, chairman and Principal Steve Samuels noted. As an air rights project, it’s also the most complex, requiring coordination with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation on lane closures to enable the construction of foundations, support walls and the elevated deck and utilities.
MassDOT agreed to relocate the on-ramp from Massachusetts Avenue to the Massachusetts Turnpike further north, giving Elkus Manfredi Architects more flexibility for the location of the buildings. The citizenM hotel occupies the northern side of the site, next to a new ramp and redesigned intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Newbury Street.
