Not enough changed Thursday in the plans for four stories of condos near Davis Square that Cambridge’s Historical Commission would allow demolition of the current building at 178-180 Elm St. North.
The current building on the North Cambridge city line with Somerville is a double house built in 1892 with a pair of turrets echoing those on the two buildings to the left. Its six apartments are empty, and developer Charles Zammuto intends to put up 16 homes by right under multifamily zoning laws passed last year.
In this third meeting on the project after sessions June 18 and Aug. 6, a finding of architectural significance and a 12-month pause on work stayed in place, and Zammuto muttered angrily, unmuted and overheard on Zoom.
“This is a joke. This is a joke,” Zammuto said, before speaking over a commission member in such a way that the only audible word from him that followed was “motherfucker.”
“I don’t know why we’re we’re getting railroaded. Three meetings we’ve been bullied around and tortured over design review,” Zammuto said.
While executive director Charlie Sullivan explained that the commission looked to balance the public interest in preservation with factors such as the need for housing – and several members said they liked much about the project – overall, commissioners were wary. They realized at the previous meeting that the plans “were demonstrably prepared by AI,” Sullivan said, “and had several serious internal inconsistencies that made the commission question the buildability of this project.”
One member “noted missing kitchens from two units,” according to meeting minutes, and on Thursday members said considering that shock, they had to proceed with caution around a demolition that cannot be undone.
Size, shape and shifting answers
The continued hearing had more stumbles.
Commission members saw that one set of drawings by architect Vera Xie, the line-based schematics known as elevations, differed from the renderings meant to give a sense of how the building would look and feel at Elm Street and Miller Avenue. Most significantly, the building in the renderings was smaller.
If neighbors look at those renderings, “what they’re seeing is not what they’re going to be seeing when this is built,” vice chair Liz Lyster said.
“The height of this building on the elevations is substantially taller than the neighboring buildings,” member Gavin Kleespies said.
Exploring that scale, members asked Xie and Zammuto to break down reasons for the building height. A description evolved under questioning. “The ceiling height, in the course of this conversation, went from 9 feet tall to 10 feet tall,” member Kyle Sheffield said, confirming what he’d just heard.
Lyster felt the floor plans, which lacked measurements, looked odd. “From my perspective as a real estate agent, I don’t think that furniture would actually fit in there, and I don’t know where you would put a television,” she said. Since realistic interiors can affect exteriors, it was worrisome that she was “not sure this is a realistic layout.”
“Affordable-unit ghetto”
The developers intend to have 14 units with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, and two units with one bedroom and one bathroom. They said they expected to group the smaller affordable homes on the first floor. Alternate commission member Florrie Darwin had to remind them that zoning specifies that affordable units are supposed to be the equivalent of other units.
“There’s also a preference to spreading the affordable units so that there’s not an affordable-unit ghetto in one part of the building,” Darwin said.
Commission members liked a lot of what they saw, including porches and an individual flavor – its corners are top-to-bottom projecting bays – that drew compliments. It’s not “the same box that we’ve seen over and over again,” Lyster said.
Designs show a rooftop recreation deck and an underground garage accessed from Miller Avenue with at least six parking spaces. Those are not for leasing to individual tenants, Xie said, but will hold a minifleet of shared electric cars.
Looking much the same
The project was at such an early stage that it didn’t seem necessary to have every detail pinned down, Xie said. The team had focused instead on answering previous commission concerns to explore “whether the new building could become a better neighbor and one that respects the historic character of Elm Street, while also allowing the site to serve present-day housing needs.”
“We studied the surrounding houses more closely,” Xie said. “We’re not trying to reproduce a Queen Anne building literally. We’re trying to carry forward the architectural logic of the neighborhood [in a proposal that] reinterprets those elements in a contemporary building.”
The problem was that there had not been significant changes since the last look at the plans, commissioners said. “What I see in this new presentation is not substantially or even slightly different,” Lyster said, “so I don’t see any reason why we would change the decision that we made.”
Because the project is by-right, members were conscious that the developers don’t have to change anything and could just wait out the 12-month preservation delay – now down to 11 months. But they encouraged refinements and a smaller scale to get earlier approval, such as lowering ceiling heights to 9 feet from 10 and reconsidering a truer turret form, presumably atop one of the projected-bay corners.
Architect to architect
Alternate member Michael Rogove approved of the project as it was. “A building of this size is okay in this area. It’s steps from Davis Square, which has some taller buildings,” said Rogove, a renter who gave weight to the idea of more housing. “If we’re going to vote no, I want to set the proponents up for something like success, however we can.”
The vote was 6-1 to reaffirm the preferably preserved status for the the next 11 months. Rogove was the lone vote to allow demolition earlier.
Some of the architects on the commission said they empathized with Xie on the problem of reverse-engineering plans from a design. Architect Yuting Zhang also steered Xie gently away from trying to use AI to replace her own creativity and ability to respond to change.
“That’s the beauty of being an architect. It should not be taken away by artificial intelligence and all these new tools,” Zhang said. Using traditional methods for drawings that get shown off to boards is “the most interesting part.”
