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Leland Cott
Adjunct Professor Department of Urban Planning and Design |
Projects
Blackstone Office Renovation LEED Platinum Certified 2007 Honor Award for Sustainable Design The Blackstone Office renovation for Harvard’s University Operations Services is the transformation of three historic structures into a single, state-of-the-art, LEED Platinum certified facility that provides a collaborative workplace environment while ensuring occupant health and comfort. The design solution maximizes systems efficiency, user circulation, and departmental adjacencies. A new vertical light-slot connects two previously detached buildings, providing daylight into newly discovered interior space and announcing a contemporary intervention within the historic framework.
Radcliffe Gymnasium 2007 Cambridge Historical Commission Preservation Award Bruner/Cott has transformed the McKim Mead & White gymnasium, built in 1898 for Radcliffe College, into an elegant, iconic resource for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The new facility houses lecture, performance, and gathering spaces with full provisions for catered events, and offices for administrators. The completion of this renovation marks not only a success in the repurposing of a historic structure, but also creates a symbolic and physical salon for the Institute.
The University of Chicago built Bartlett Hall as an athletic facility in 1901. For its second century of service, Bruner/Cott has transformed this historic neo-gothic structure into a new 550-seat dining hall and a college gathering space.
The challenge was to introduce entirely new uses into the building concealing the complex new infrastructure that 21st Century occupancy and codes require. The program includes a modern foodservice operation: dining rooms, exhibition cooking servery, production kitchen, and storage areas, together with 10,000 sf of new student activity areas for events, performances, offices, and informal lounge spaces. The large addition conceals the receiving docks and was designed to perfectly match the original building with limestone cladding and custom-fabricated accordion-fold oak doors. The mechanical systems are all new: 350 tons of air conditioning, lighting, and three new elevators, among others. The running track is preserved and is now a student lounge and observation
deck, At the new west entry, a low curving limestone wall and sloped sidewalk has been placed to wind its way through a stand of mature trees help to redefine the quadrangle entryway and create a timeless design element that is universally accessible. AWARDS
Bruner/Cott worked with Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences to renovate the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center (QRAC) on Garden Street in Cambridge. The project included modification of the existing gymnasium and support facilities to provide a new home for the Harvard Dance Program. The dance space was developed by the construction of a new, stand-alone structure that sits inside one-half of the existing multi-purpose/gymnasium space. The state-of-the-art theater includes 400 square feet of mirrors, remote-controlled sound and lighting equipment, and custom-designed flooring, suitable for all dance types. The design provides separate exterior entrances and identities for the Dance Program and for the remaining athletic center activities. The building’s mechanical system upgrades include new sprinklers throughout, and geo-thermal wells for cooling/air conditioning.
This synagogue for a suburban Boston congregation includes a 250-seat sanctuary, a library/chapel for smaller services, eight classrooms, support offices, and a function room for receptions with kosher kitchen.
The site and building have been composed to provide proper orientation for religious worship while maximizing the strengths of the site’s natural features, which include two mature stands of pine trees and a gently sloping lawn. The building’s shape was developed to suggest a hierarchy of volumes, leading the eye to the most sacred space within: the sanctuary. A continuous clerestory provides natural light, and the space intimately envelops the congregation seated in concentric pews, while offering select views to the wooded outdoors. The exterior, clad primarily in wood, represents a contemporary aesthetic, while deriving many of its forms from a variety of historical precedents. Faith & Form Magazine, Religious Architecture Award, 2003
The exterior is respectfully reworked, in keeping with the building’s historic status. The interior detailing of two new atriums extends the building’s original Art Deco style into a new vernacular. Spectacular new skylights, inspired by expressionist movies of the 1920s, light the seven-story spaces Bruner/Cott has carved from the building's core. The new enclosed courts, joined by the second level concourse, and served by exposed vertical transportation systems and public balconies, deliver natural light to inner office suites. Together with the basement, an existing warehouse in the rear was adapted into on-site parking. Our challenge was to use the old elements of the Sears building as raw material to create a new building; to metamorphose a 1929 warehouse into a 21st Century office center.
The landscape design by the Office of Dan Kiley integrates an underused park with the open space and recreational areas of the campus site, and begins to reestablish long-lost links through the arsenal site while reconnecting residents of Watertown to the waterfront along the Charles River. New uses for the site include offices, research and development space, plus parking, traffic and infrastructure improvements.
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA is the largest contemporary art museum in America and a self-sustaining economic catalyst for the depressed town of North Adams. Bruner/Cott has created an award-winning new museum out of "found buildings," the fabric of a hundred-year-old mill complex. Phase 1, completed in 1999, includes nineteen galleries, one of them 335 feet long, the largest "black box" theater in New England, and 60,000 square feet of art-related commercial space. To achieve the extraordinary construction cost of $68 per SF, existing systems are integrated with new equipment, and a permanent on-site repair facility trains local labor to repair windows, masonry, etc. The museum has put North Adams on the must-see art map, and the local unemployment rate has dropped almost twelve per cent. Harvard University, University Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts University Hall was designed in 1813 by Charles Bulfinch, architect of the Massachusetts State House, and a primary architect of the United States Capital. The large, symmetrical, granite building sits at the very center of the Harvard campus. It is a Harvard icon, the first stop on any tourist's visit, and it also continues to house important administrative and meeting functions, notably the offices of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
In addition to extensive historic restoration, Bruner/Cott's architectural work included designing concealed ramps and lifts for universal access throughout the building, all-new mechanical systems, and significant structural repairs, all of which had to be built within rigorous historic constraints. The great Faculty Room, originally the College Chapel, has returned to the deeper colors of the late nineteenth century, when it took on its present use. Bulfinch's superb proportions and materials have been brought forward. University Hall has been made functionally but invisibly modern at the same time that it has regained much of its original character. |
