Who needs architecture? 


“Everyone” is the answer to that question, especially if you ask an architect. Curious then, that most architects in this country only pursue the top 2 percent of citizens and corporations – those few who can most afford it – as clients. 


Studio G Architects, working from offices in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, take a more integrated view. Focusing their design efforts primarily on non-profit clients, this firm – of mostly women architects, designers and project managers – proclaims: “We are building sustainable communities, one project at a time.” Their built work around the Hub suggests they really are trying to accomplish this. 


A list of Studio G’s clients runs to dozens of organizations whose mission it is to make life truly livable for Bostonians. Among them: Brighton Main Streets, Copper Beech Montessori School, Communities United, the Fenway Community Design Center, the City of Boston. One of their most recent is MAHA, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, for whom they have designed a new, rather green, headquarters on Dorchester Avenue, a few minutes walk from Codman Square, a short distance from the Ashmont Red Line station in Boston.





A Home For MAHA


The Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance works for equal opportunity in affordable housing. For 24 years this community-based organization has helped to develop more than $5 billion of investment in affordable housing in Massachusetts. It has assisted some 12,000 families in buying their first homes in this state; served nearly 15,000 educational clients, teaching classes about home buying, home ownership, how to stay clear of predatory lending practices. If ever there were a stabilizing influence in our community, it is this organization. And now, after years of making-do in makeshift space, in the same location as their new building, MAHA inhabits architecture designed just for it.


The reason everyone needs architecture has to do with the work architecture performs, with its complexity. We want buildings to look a certain way on the outside, as objects, to telegraph their importance to the neighbors and fit into their surroundings, historic or natural. We want them to look a certain way inside, too, as the space in which we live our lives. We need them to function, to temper the natural environment for us. In fact architecture functions in a lot of ways, at several different scales, all of them at once.


Buildings keep out rain and strangers; let in sunlight and views, they deliver warm air and fresh water, give identity to neighborhoods. Buildings function as comfortable additions to the city, explaining the history of a place, orienting people to where they are in a landscape, providing cues as to where they should go next. 


But the one great service architecture delivers is this: architecture explains relationships. The space architects make and the materials and textures and colors architects use to make it describe how people work together, describe the relationships of folks inside a building with those down the corridor, with those outside. Architecture actually allows those relationships to occur in space. Human life is, to a large extent, made understandable by architecture.


Studio G has made MAHA’s work understandable in its new building, and has done so at a pretty low price-per-square-foot. MAHA headquarters is not a big building. It is situated on an equally tiny lot. As a result, its 9,500 square feet are squeezed upward into three stories. So MAHA’s architecture begins its work at the scale of urban design. It is the first real new development near Ashmont station, and it has presence. Because of its height you can see it from the station, the place from which most visitors arrive. 





Form And Function


From Ashmont one sees MAHA as a simple form against the sky, a dark red box with a bright silver metal-clad corner facing the street. This corner contains an entry at the ground, scoops to gather sunlight at the roof, and in between are stairs, elevator, corridors, circulation space for the entire building. This one bright piece connects people to the building itself, visually, outside on Dorchester Avenue; and it connects people to each other inside, as they walk through the building and see each other across the open space it creates, through their glass-walled offices and classrooms and work-spaces. 


The color of the box itself matches the color of brick walls in the neighborhood; but this is not the 1800s; and this is not a building that needs to display costly cladding. Instead Studio G has created fresh and budget-friendly wood-frame construction covered by a rainscreen of geometrically precise hardy-board panels, installed by volunteer carpenters’ union apprentices as part of their training. 


Inside, MAHA’s design is meant to connect the building to its surrounding street life. In fact it is planned to generate part of that street life by locating commercial businesses throughout the entire ground floor, with MAHA’s own offices and teaching spaces on floors 2 and 3. Materials tend toward the healthy and durable: low VOC paint on the walls; bamboo on the floors; in the largest teaching space, there is no finished ceiling at all. Instead, exposed wood joists lend an air of informality to community gatherings to provide an example of what first-time homeowners ought to be looking at anyway. 


Winter sunlight floods the building through operable windows (they all open for fresh air) in offices and meeting rooms. Studio G has strategically placed more glass at those rooms’ interior walls, so that natural light shines all the way to the center of the building. Electric bulbs remain turned-off until sunset.


The result of Studio G’s design: light, space, material, proportion, color, is that people at MAHA feel in this building as if they are working together. A visit to the place shows that they really are. That’s architecture.■


Jeff Stein, Banker & Tradesman’s 
architecture critic, is dean of the 
Boston Architectural College and head 
of its School of Architecture.