Kishore Varanasi
Title: Director of urban design, CBT Architects, Boston
Age: 39
Experience: 15 years
Kishore Varanasi has only been in the architecture business for 15 years, but he’s already had a hand in some of Greater Boston’s highest-profile developments.
Varanasi, now 39, was named the youngest partner in the history of CBT Architects in 2011. His background includes helping design the $2-billion Northpoint mixed-use complex in Cambridge, the Government Center garage redevelopment project in Boston and the ongoing Mass. and Main Central Square Development Plan in Cambridge. Varanasi holds a master’s degree in urbanism from MIT.
Q: You must be glad to see Northpoint moving forward after years of delays. What were the takeaways from your first major urban development project?
A: It’s a great story and it really set the stage for a lot of unique thinking about the way we practice here. The big ideas where it’s possible to find synergies between multiple interests that you may think are competing. We came in and looked at the site. It was a brownfield site. While it had a lot of future potential, it may not have had a lot of value. So we took the idea of open space as a great cross-section of what the community could agree on as well as what the developer could benefit from. The community became very supportive. That public space ended up solving all the stormwater management issues on-site so the development could save a lot of money.
Q: How are you using the MindMixer [virtual town hall] website and app to gather community comment on the Mass and Main Central Square planning in Cambridge?
A: To our knowledge, this is the first time MindMixer has been used by the private sector. (Developer) Twining Properties really wanted to reach out to the greater public. Two-thirds of the people who live in Central Square have moved in during the last five years. You hear from the rest of them through the public meetings, but how do you hear from the other two-thirds? Interestingly enough, the majority of the people who’ve joined MindMixer are the (original) third. The average age of people signing up is 40s to 50s.
Q: What are Twining’s plans to retain some of the independent retailers in Central Square?
A: It takes an enlightened approach that they believe in that kind of thing. The reason why Central Square has so many mom-and-pops is because they’re older buildings and rents are low. Anytime you build a new building you want to charge more rents. As a developer, do you charge a dollar more up above (for offices or housing) if you charge a dollar less down below? You’re trying to sell to a group of people who are very different from the earlier generation. They’re not looking for the sterile lobby and the Starbucks.
Q: Historically Boston has a reputation for being hostile to density and skyscrapers. Is that changing and is that a good thing?
A: It is changing. The need for density has been slowly accepted. We don’t have to any longer go in front of the community in fear that density will be a non-starter anymore.
Q: What do you think of the criticisms that the Seaport District has too many boxy and similar office buildings?
A: The Seaport is going to be an exciting place fast-forward 10 years from now. Cities take time to evolve and you often jump to conclusions very quickly. We (CBT Architects) did the master plan for Fan Pier back in 1998 and 2000. One of the best things that happened to Fan Pier was the Institute of Contemporary Art and how it started to change perceptions.
Getting back to the question of buildings being big and boxy. This is a challenge with modern buildings. Often buildings tend to have one entry. And when you bring in a corporate tenant, they would like a certain amount of corporate identity and they take up a lot of frontage space.
What can change is the Boston street guidelines. When the Seaport was being laid out, this idea wasn’t there. All of these streets that you think of – Congress Street, Northern Avenue, Summer Street – were really wide and they were built on the idea of automobile infrastructure. It’s time to repurpose them and make them more multimodal and complete streets to tie the Seaport together.
Top 5 Favorite Buildings:
- Angkor Vat, Cambodia
- Hancock Tower, Boston
- Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Hong Kong
- Hunt Library, NC State University, Raleigh
- La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
