Image courtesy of Stantec Architecture
The Matteson Cos. hopes to build an 8-story office building next to a South Boston landmark using a material that’s seeing a surge in interest in the area: cross-laminated timber.
The 123,400-square-foot building at 80-110 West Broadway would rise next to the 4-story building housing the historic Amrheins bar but would replace the one-story restaurant portion of the business, according to an application filed with the Boston Planning & Development Agency. The project would include ground-floor retail and 25 underground parking spaces.
The application states Amrhein’s will continue in operation in a 1,700-square-foot bar-restaurant in the first floor of its iconic 1896 building at the corner of Broadway and A Street. The office building’s ground floor would also contain 8,500 square feet of retail space. The six residential units in the 1896 building would be preserved.
If approved, the Matteson Cos. project will join another cross-laminated timber (CLT) building next door at 69 A St. The Margulies Perruzzi-designed 5-story, 45,000-square-foot mixed-use project began construction last July and is expected to be completed in early 2021.
Also called “mass timber construction,” CLT material consists of massive beams and floor panels made from smaller pieces of wood glued together under high pressure at right angles to each other. The resulting material, its proponents say, is both lighter than concrete and as strong as steel in many cases and can offer more fire resistance.
The material also requires much less time to assemble on-site. Commodore Builders, the firm constructing 69 A St., told Banker & Tradesman earlier this month that it took only six days to erect each floor of the project thanks to the lack of concrete to pour and the lower number of trades to coordinate.
Beyond giving finished spaces the look of post-and-beam mills and offering a much faster construction timeline, architects and developers pioneering the material’s use say it also helps create building with a much smaller carbon footprint as it requires much less CO2-intensive steel and concrete.
In the application for 80-110 Broadway, project consultant Cosentini stated the low-carbon building material will be paired with a variable refrigerant flow, fully electric HVAC system that does not require on-site burning of natural gas for an 18 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions per year over the state’s “stretch” energy efficiency code. The system will cost roughly $1.7 million more than a traditional natural gas-powered system to install, Cosentini said.
Building code changes in store for next year will permit the material to be used in mid-rise buildings, spurring developers in Roxbury, Malden and elsewhere to propose projects up to 14 stories tall.
