Along the South Boston waterfront, sleek, clean lines of white and silver seem to point offshore from the exterior walls of Boston’s still-new contemporary art museum, indicating the ocean waters swirling beneath a blue-grey sky in the nearby harbor.

Looking east down Seaport Boulevard, past the wide open expanses of parking lots to the left and right, the pinkish-orange brick of the Seaport Place office towers and hotel dominate the landscape.

Then, turning west, the scanning eye catches on the brick and beam cluster that comprises the historic Fort Point area. Here, artists and artisans create paintings and sculptures in spaces alongside the architectural firms determining the design aesthetics that will define the Seaport district.

Depending on where one stands in Boston’s Seaport district, the architectural statements that surround you can vary greatly in scale and appearance. That’s quite a departure for a neighborhood in Boston. Look at the Back Bay. There is some diversity in the architecture of the neighborhood’s commercial district, mostly concentrated on Boylston Street – the towering glass of the Hancock building, the brick on the new Clarendon residential tower, the mix of materials in the Prudential tower and 500 Boylston St.

But the majority of the Back Bay is comprised of four- or five-story brick buildings, many of them seemingly identical in scale and materials. The same is true for most of tony Beacon Hill. And the Financial District, despite its multitude of office buildings, also offers little variety in architecture and streetscape.

But the Seaport is, and continues to be, something very different from those established areas of the city. It’s known as one of the final frontiers for development within the city limits. The rail yards-cum-parking lots that once made up almost the entirety of the district’s landscape seem to beg for a higher, more aesthetically astute use.    

The Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) has fully embraced the fact that the Seaport is still developing as a neighborhood – its character, its amenities and its architecture – and therefore an area deserving of close attention. Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino has branded the area the Innovation District to lure creative, technology-focused and life sciences firms to the area.

But the designation is not just about the kinds of tenants that occupy office, lab and warehouse space in the district. City Hall also expects forward-thinking innovation to apply to the way buildings are designed, both inside and out. BRA senior planners have tried to encourage buildings in the Seaport that reflect the new century by utilizing contemporary materials and ensuring energy efficiency with the use of new technologies, said Kairos Shen, the agency’s chief planner.

BRA Design Input

And developers have certainly responded. The curvy, glass-curtained Manulife headquarters at 601 Congress St. was one of the first LEED Platinum buildings in the city, the highest grade given from the U.S. Green Building Council for a property’s environmental achievements. Joe Fallon’s One Marina Park Drive at Fan Pier gained LEED Silver status. And the design of the Boston Convention Center, with its soaring overhead entryway, is unlike most other buildings, in the district or across the city.   

But there’s also the Fort Point historic district to consider. The 55-acre area, which includes the old Boston Wharf Co. buildings, is designated a Landmark District by City Hall, so there are height and other limits on new construction in the area

At the Channel Center project on A Street, State Street Bank is planning to build an 11-story building with 521,000 square feet of office space and a 970-space parking garage. The building is not technically in the historic area, so the proposed property can be taller than most of the buildings in the district. But the design includes a mixture of materials that pay homage to the Fort Point properties.

“The materials are playing off the masonry and brick fabric of the historic district,” Shen told Banker & Tradesman. “It’s a more contemporary version of a warehouse for office workers. We pushed them to keep within that kind of architectural vocabulary of a warehouse like the buildings around it.”

The BRA has an intimate role in determining architectural schemes in major projects across the city, but perhaps nowhere is that influence as important as in the Seaport, where deep-pocketed developers and city planners are deciding what particular signatures will mark the waterfront and its skyline.

“Our job at the BRA is not to dictate a style,” Shen offered. “We work with architects and developers so that their approaches to buildings maximize their quality and … relate to the other buildings going up around them or that are planned. But it’s the Innovation District, so we don’t want to have just one architectural style, we don’t want a place that is uniform. Not that consistency is bad or monotonous, but in this particular area we want as much variety as possible because the city is richer if there is more variety there. We want this area of the city to be really contemporary and forward-looking and diverse in its physical environment.”

‘Different Voices’

The kind of diversity Shen is looking for is constantly evolving in the Seaport district.

And depending on which proposal the BRA selects, the next waterfront project to truly “make it new,” as modernist writer Ezra Pound urged fellow early 20th century artists, could be built in the harbor itself. The city has received four proposals for mixed-use developments on a pier to be built between the new Liberty Wharf buildings and the Banker of America Pavilion.

The BRA wants a project that will increase pedestrian traffic in the area while encouraging a focus on marine activities. The agency also wants to improve the overall appearance of the site through private resources, while promoting water-based activities with daytime and hourly boat slips for visitors to the port.

Proposals include a concert hall, a luxury hotel, restaurants and a fishing pier. But none depart so obviously from the current architectural aesthetic of the area than the proposal by Jon Cronin for what he is calling “Quays Boston.” The 138,595-square-foot Quays project would house offices and restaurants inside a long, five-story building encased in glass. At either end would be large, yellow, L-shaped structures, making the property resemble a luxury yacht.

“The waterfront should be made up of a number of different voices adding to the conversation,” said David Manfredi, founding principal of Elkus Manfredi Architects, the project’s designer. “The commonality is in recognizing something special about where you are. Waterfront is so little and so precious, you really need to respond to those views. Like at Liberty Wharf, [the new proposal] gives the sense that you’ve reached the end of land, that you’ve engaged the water. It’s a very fun challenge.”

The current and next generation of architects will provide those voices and create the context that is now so lacking on the northern side of Seaport Boulevard, Manfredi added. Much of the buildable land there is still blanketed in surface parking lots.

“There’s a scale to the waterfront that’s big and gutsy and workman-like, and I think people recognize that,” he continued. “It’s a district where you can be bold and it is about a bigger scale.”