It's time to make up a bunch of awards and hand them out to the good, the bad and the ugly in the Greater Boston real estate universe. Yep, it's the fifth annual Curbed Boston Awards, y'all!
This year brought many proposals for shiny, new developments and other additions to the Greater Boston streetscape. And fabulously evocative renderings invariably accompanied these proposals so that we might visualize what would be going up. And yet. Not all renderings were equally fabulous. This particular Curbed Boston Award honors the coolest of the cool, starting with the rendering for the Sky Lounge of the planned Siena condos in the game-change-y South End. You can see the beautiful people looking down on the rest of us.
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And who could forget the many, many renderings that accompanied Boston's ultimately doomed Olympics bid. Two of the coolest above.
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Plans for the 26-story office building at 380 Stuart Street in Back Bay first dropped during the summer. The rendered tower looked like a giant paper shredder up top, but that only made its curved design that much cooler.
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The rendering of the so-called sea steps in front of the planned Pier 4 condo complex on the waterfront caused a particular buzz when they dropped in the early autumn. There doesn't appear to be anything like them in Boston right now.
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What if the one City Hall architectural buffs the world over love to hate looked more ... futuristic? Harry Bartnick, a professor emeritus at Suffolk U., tossed out this glass-curtained Boston City Hall idea in a Globe op-ed in July. Note the tinting.
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Not all of the year's coolest renderings were of buildings born and unborn. The MBTA hosted an online vote this year to pick paint jobs for new Orange, Red and Green line trains; and, to that end, presented nine options. Above are two of the cooler ones (we think). Unfortunately—and hilariously—apparent ballot-stuffing appears to have negated the results.
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Finally, who will ever forget the renderings for the South End's Lucas, which started dropping in the spring? They showed eight glassy floors of luxury condos erupting out of the puddingstone of the old Holy Trinity German Catholic Church. As perfect a representation not only of the project, but of the changes, for better and for worse, sweeping Boston right now.
· Give Boston's City Hall a Much-Needed Makeover [Globe]
· Check Out the First Rendering of Siena's 'Skyclub Lounge' [Curbed Boston]
· The 11 Projects Transforming Boston's South End Forever [Curbed Boston]
· 18 Renderings and Maps to Explain the Boston Olympics [Curbed Boston]
· Is This Boston's Most Ambitious Design For a New Building? [Curbed Boston]
· Here's a Closer Look at the Future Sea Steps of Pier 4 [Curbed Boston]
· Ballot-Stuffing Complicates Selection of New T Paint Jobs [Curbed Boston]
· Greater Boston's Five Most Controversial Developments Now [Curbed Boston]
· Our Curbed Awards '15 archive [Curbed Boston]