It's time to make up a bunch of awards and hand them out to the good, the bad and the ugly in the Hub real estate universe. Yep, it's time for the Second Annual Curbed Boston Awards!
This was a toughie. There is, after all, a construction boom under way in the Hub right now; and with that comes many, many renderings, some pie in the sky but most meant to depict what developers (and their financial backers) want to see. There have also been those renderings dished by the public sector, like the below of a revamped South Station (courtesy of MassDOT).
And there have been renderings not of developments at all, but of ... concepts, for lack of a better word. And none was more bandied-about development concept in the Hub in 2012 than that of the micro-apartment. Techies! Young people! Functionality! Density! Below is a rendering from architect ADD Inc. of a micro-apartment in the planned Pier 4 in Southie. It's expected to rent for around $1,500 and be much in demand.
The year's coolest rendering, far and away (in our humblebrag opinion), however, was that of the planned Millennium Tower at the old Filene's site in Downtown Crossing. Not the tower itself—it appears to be your typical, post-modernist streak of gray glass—but the tower against the Boston skyline. This rendering dropped from Handel Architects in October of the expected 56-story tower, the city's tallest residential one and third tallest overall.
For showing just how high Hub development has been reaching of late, the Millennium Tower against the Boston skyline wins the 2012 Curbed Boston Award for Coolest Rendering.
· Our Updated New Development Heatmap: Then There Were 50 [Curbed Boston]
· Pier 4: the 50 Innovation Units and Their Pals Just the Beginning [Curbed Boston]
· How Millennium Tower Will Look Against the Boston Skyline [Curbed Boston]
· Tall Tales! Introducing the Boston Towers Heatmap [Curbed Boston]