The flexibility and openness of Shepley Bulfinch’s LEED-certified Boston office was heralded in a front-page article in today’s Banker and Tradesman.

The feature, by columnist and Boston Architectural College professor Jeff Stein, applauded the mobility and horizontal organization of the office, which is designed to foster a collaborative environment and reconfiguration of staff as project demands require. The office, located in Boston’s Seaport District near the World Trade Center, was awarded LEED-CI Silver certification earlier this year.

The office will be on show next May, when Boston hosts the National Convention of the American Institute of Architects. Shepley Bulfinch is a convention sponsor.

Shepley Bulfinch’s design of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center is cited as a model of how to design for flexible implementation in Richard De Neufville’s new book, “Flexibility in Engineering Design,” published by MIT Press in September. The original design of the medical center, which opened in 1991, enabled subsequent vertical and horizontal expansion.

The book offers a high-level overview of why flexibility in design is needed to deliver significantly increased value. It describes in detail methods to identify, select, and implement useful flexibility. For Dartmouth-Hitchcock, that meant development and execution of a ...[more]

Why do buildings last? How do we design flexible spaces that can change and adapt? 

A team from Shepley took on this question as part of the Open Building conference at Build Boston last month. The conference tasked three firms – Shepley, Payette, and Cannon – to propose a building that would evolve over time to house multiple uses on a large scale site in Somerville. We took the long historical view and, after a week of exhaustive debate, found that architectural systems which are designed to change rarely work or ...[more]

Shepley Bulfinch’s design of the Anderson University Center at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota has won a Facilities Design Award from the Association of College Unions International (ACUI), it was announced at ACUI’s annual conference last week.

“This award honors more than the design of the Anderson Center,” said Shepley Bulfinch project designer Luke Voiland. “It recognizes the value of a design and planning process that brought everyone to the table.”

Since it opened last fall, the Carol Young Anderson and Dennis L. Anderson Center has become the heart of ...[more]

We live in a time of constraint and experimentation, when both the state and the nation are seeking ways to enhance our economic well-being. No single institution is more on the front lines of these changes than the community college and nowhere is that more apparent than when examining the physical fabric of the school.

Over the past year I’ve worked with a Massachusetts community college, developing a campus master plan to guide the future physical development of the campus. When we raised the idea of arranging future buildings to create a traditional ...[more]

The US Green Building Council has awarded LEED® certification to Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven in recognition of the hospital’s successful sustainable design and construction strategies. The 516,000 square foot hospital is located in downtown New Haven.

When planning for Smilow began in 2002, sustainable strategies, including LEED certification, were not widely considered attainable in healthcare, given their high energy demands and other perceived constraints. The project team rose to the challenge of making Smilow a sustainable trendsetter. New opportunities for LEED points were sought and identified by ...[more]