Scott Pollack
Title: Principal, Arrowstreet
Age: 51
Industry Experience: 29 years

Scott Pollack is helping design pedestrian-friendly communities from Somerville’s Union Square to military bases across the U.S. A principal at Boston-based architects Arrowstreet, Pollack has been involved in such projects as the master planning for the Pier 4 development on the South Boston waterfront and Related Beal’s repositioning and expansion of Congress Square, a 458,000-square-foot portfolio of five office buildings in Boston’s Financial District. He leads Arrowstreet’s planning work for the U.S. military’s Healthy Base Initiative, which is redesigning installations to improve health and wellness for military families. A Somerville resident, he also served on the city’s Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee, which drew up the framework for the pending redevelopment of Union Square.

Q: How did the designs to modernize the buildings at Related Beal’s Congress Square evolve?

A: Steve Faber from Related Beal called and asked if we could help. They knew they wanted to do something that would enliven the streetscape if we were able to really inside-out the building. The building was the first branch for Shawmut National Bank and then Fidelity Investments took the building over and they sort of turned their backs on the street. As a corporation they’re security-focused. In the economy of today and with the kind of tenants that are going to downtown, it’s not really the Financial District anymore. It’s a lot of creative economy. This site (Arrowstreet’s offices at 10 Post Office Square), sitting between Government Center and Faneuil Hall and City Hall, is something of a missing tooth from a public perspective. I work here and I forget I’m only a block away from all that stuff because the building is so inwardly-focused. So we started working with Related Beal to reposition the base of the building to create additional value up above. And we started having long conversations about what do you do to a building of that age to make it as good as any other class A office building in the city?

Related discovered there were a few large users looking for space that was a little more than they had to offer, so the discussion began about adding more floors to the building. In many of the old buildings, there’s this light well in the middle of the building. We figured out you could drop a brand new elevator core right through that light well, clean the existing floor plates up so you get really good, modern, open office space and use that new core to hold up an addition on top of the building. The six-story glass addition was shaped to reflect the sky. It’s an interesting building because you can’t ever see the whole building because you’re downtown. You can’t ever get that long view of the building.

Q: How is Arrowstreet supporting the goals of the Healthy Base Initiative?

A: We’ve been doing work for the military since the 1970s. The military is always looking for best practices and market knowledge, so we’ve been doing planning work in their services end which is food, lodging and retail services. Military installations, when they were built, were out in the middle of nowhere so they needed to be a whole town. Travis Air Force Base in Arizona when it was built was out in the middle of the desert. It’s now completely surrounded by the city of Phoenix. So the relationship between what you need to provide on the installation has changed.

And most of the people in uniform are Millennials at this point, so they need for services and support is very different than it used to be. So, working with the government services group out of CBRE in Washington, D.C., we do what are called “project validations.” They say, we think we need to add retail and food. We help them develop a process. You look at whether there is a need, how big should it be, what should it serve and how do you actually build it? They have to do a pro forma and determine if it’s financially viable.

That led on the food side to a conversation: are we providing them the right services to live a healthy lifestyle? How do we support them in what are very difficult lives for servicemen and their families? The office of the Secretary of Defense started the Healthy Base Initiative, looking at what we could do to improve health outcomes. We had smoking cessation experts. We worked with a group out of Cornell about menus and displaying food. How do you make installations walkable? How do you get people to take the stairs? How do you make installations walkable?

Very often everything is so far apart. You get in your car and drive. It’s like suburban sprawl. It relates a lot to campus planning for universities and many other parts of the economy. People are interested in how we promote healthy living and lifestyles and how we configure our stuff. We’ve developed a set of tools for deciding if a base is bikeable, and if you add bike paths, are you making it more bikeable? Can you walk-score a place and figure out where the walking paths should be? Where’s the best place to put a farmer’s market so more people have access to healthy food? We’ve been doing that work across the Department of Defense. The final report is supposed to come out in a few weeks. And we’re starting a process with the Marine Corps looking at their service facilities across 18 installations worldwide. It’s about how we bring best practices from the commercial real estate world to the military and how do we make the lives of servicepeople better.

Q: Is there a guideline for what’s considered a walkable distance from housing to retail or services?

A: There are a number of ways of looking at it and different rules. The answer is it really depends on the environment. How far people are willing to walk even downtown is quite different to how far people are willing to walk in Lexington Center, for instance. When you look at walkability, are the sidewalks safe and well-maintained and lit at night? Do they get snow clearance in the winter? You can have all the sidewalks you want in New England and there isn’t a budget to shovel them or an ordinance to make the owners shovel them, they don’t really help.

Q: How will Union Square change under the framework of the master plan?

A: The comprehensive plan is complete and it’s waiting for the alderman to put it into place. It’s been a really good thing for the city. The grounding of McGrath Highway is going to make a huge difference. I live right near City Hall. Bringing McGrath to the ground through that last segment through Brickbottom and Union Square is going to make a difference to my neighborhood. You could from one to the other and not feel like you’re walking under a highway underpass. That’s where the growth of the city belongs and has to go. It’s just so cut off.

Pollack’s Top 5 Industry Influencers:

1. Robert Slattery, former president of Arrowstreet: Bob was a professor and mentor while I was at MIT
2. Steve Karp, president of New England Development: Steve taught me about real estate as a business and how to think about buildings as an investment.
3. Gregg Rechler, managing partner of Rechler Equity: Gregg is a friend who has enabled me to explore all sorts of ways to create authentic, interesting places.
4. David Barrett, former senior vice president of Boston Properties: David taught me what it is like to be the “owner” of a project, what is important to the owner and how to work in a way that is responsive to the owner’s needs.
5. Ann Wagner,  MIT art history professor: Ann really taught me how to see –  and how to understand what I was seeing.