Harvard Square Theatre might be reborn as mixed-use building with movie screens

About three months ago, it looked like billionaire investor Gerald Chan would lose the long-shuttered Harvard Square Theatre in the similarly named Cambridge neighborhood to eminent domain.

Simply put, the city was fed up with waiting for a plan to redevelop, raze, or otherwise reuse the 32,080-square-foot site, which closed in 2012 and which Chan’s Morningside Group bought in 2015.

Now, it looks like Chan plans to tear down much of the existing structure and remake it into a mixed-use building running to 60,000 square feet.

It would include two movie screens, street-level retail, and five stories of office space.

The redeveloped theater would also be quite anairy, light-filled affair, per the design of architects Paulo Martins Barata and Luis Teixeira of Portugal-based Promontorio and Elizabeth Whittaker, founder of Boston’s Merge Architects.

Plans are still in motion and the project has to undergo various levels of scrutiny, including from the Cambridge Historical Commission because of the likely demolition.

But Charles Sullivan, the commission’s executive director, told Cambridge Day’s John Hawkinson that he didn’t think the current building at 10 Church Street exhibited significant exterior architecture worth preserving.

Stay tuned.

• Developer: Harvard Square Theatre site will show movies again on two screens [Day]
• Harvard Square Theatre owner has 30 days to come up with redevelopment plan [Curbed Boston]