Boston University’s new admissions center occupies the former Hillel House building in Back Bay’s West historic district.
Boston University, one of the city’s largest educational institutions, had been using a Bay State Road townhouse as its admissions center for many years. As the university’s popularity grew, that facility’s limited ability to accommodate the increasing number of visitors (40,000 per year at the time, now 70,000) became a challenge.
There was no space to handle large groups for informational briefings, necessitating the use of nearby academic spaces, it was virtually inaccessible to visitors, and it simply did not adequately represent BU as the vital, forward-looking and welcoming institution it is.
BU took ownership in 2009 of the former Hillel House, a unique International-style 1953 building at the west end of Bay State Road in the Back Bay West Historic District. It’s attached via a party wall to the historic Castle, and overlooks both Storrow Drive and the Charles River. The building had been vacant for several years following Hillel’s move to a new location down the block. The university had entertained several ideas for reuse, but had not found a program that fit.
Todd Symonds
BU engaged Boston-based architects Goody Clancy to evaluate the building’s suitability for reuse as an admissions reception center, but also left options on the table for demolition and replacement. Goody Clancy’s studies concluded that reuse was viable due to the strong match between unique program requirements, such as space for an auditorium, its central location and the intangible fact that renewing and adapting the building would preserve this Boston landmark for future generations. The building’s iconic “flatiron” shape and its location make it instantly recognizable to drivers headed eastbound on Storrow Drive, and its immediate surroundings could be upgraded to provide the kind of adjacent outdoor space that the admissions program required.
The completed Alan & Sherry Leventhal Center, opened in 2014, incorporates not only the preservation and renewal of the original building’s shell and structure, but also announces bold modifications and discrete additions. It demonstrates how historic buildings can be given new life and meet an institution’s modern needs. Goody Clancy’s design respected the inherent clarity of the building’s form, while completely reimagining the interior to facilitate the flow of visitors – which now number nearly 80,000 per year.
When this building was constructed in the early 1950s, its design did not reveal the activities within –small windows on the first floor maintained privacy from the (narrow) sidewalk, a tall opaque limestone band on the second floor concealed the social hall – none of these characteristics was conducive to creating an open, welcoming admissions reception center. Encouraged by the city of Boston’s historic preservation office, the architects designed several transparent additions on the north side to add program space and create a new egress
Arjun Mande
stair to handle large crowds. In addition, they dramatically opened up the south wall to permit views into and through the main floor of the campus, bring in more daylight and put the building’s activities on display. Another significant architectural intervention was the transformation of the entrance from a cave-like configuration that included climbing four and a half feet from the sidewalk, to a fully accessible, welcoming, at-grade entrance marked by a glowing red projecting canopy visible on Bay State Road.
The original building and its adjacent neighbor, the Castle, are literally joined at the hip, presenting the architects with the opportunity to develop a comprehensive approach to providing internal accessibility. Through the use of a single elevator and multiple stops at the different floor levels, the new center is fully accessible and the stage was set for a subsequent renovation of the Castle that would, via new openings in the party wall, make it accessible for the first time.
Complementing these architectural changes were site and landscape transformations that created an active outdoor space that serves the entire BU campus. The new configuration involved moving the street southward and significantly widening the sidewalk next to the building and the Castle, as well as incorporating a traffic-calming raised crosswalk. The design team thus created a new paved plaza that is an integral part of the admissions tour choreography; tour guides stand on granite seat-blocks to marshal their groups after the briefing inside the building prior to setting out on their walking tour of the campus.
Todd Symonds and Arjun Mande are associate principals at Goody Clancy, an architecture, planning and preservation firm based in Boston and practicing nationally.
