New Buildings for an Increasingly Popular Sport.

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Author: Blumenstyk, Goldie

BOATHOUSES

Dateline: Medford, Mass.

With boathouses there are always issues. Why? Simple, says Jeffrey D. Peterson, an architect who specializes in the genre: "They're always on the water."

For designers and contractors, building near a river or lake means puzzling out how to meet shoreline environmental regulations while also anticipating floods. It means developing foundations that can stand up to watery soils. And it means â€" when the structure is a boathouse â€" siting it thoughtfully, so that crew teams have room to hoist and carry their 55- to 60-foot boats from the hangarlike storage areas to the water without smacking either skulls or sculls.

Then, too, there often are questions about style â€" an inevitable issue for a sport like crew that is steeped in tradition, and in traditional ideas of how boathouses should look.

Mr. Peterson faced just about all these issues in designing Tufts University's new $2.3-million boathouse. An angular, two-story structure featuring two soaring walls of windows, it opened this month on the banks of the Malden River. The only issue Mr. Peterson didn't have to worry about was flooding â€" the Malden's banks are so steep here that flooding was not a factor.

But he did have to deal with other issues that are increasingly common as cost-conscious universities try to accommodate a fast-growing sport that requires prime waterfront real estate. As the sport becomes more popular, he says, "institutions are going to have to get creative about how to find land."

The Tufts boathouse is located within a 30-acre reclaimed brownfield that had once held factories and more recently was being used as an ad hoc dump. For the past five years, the men's and women's teams have been operating out of a tent about 500 yards upriver from the new facility. Tufts had looked first at a different building site on the river, but the owner of that property wasn't as willing to provide a long-term lease.

Two years ago, Tufts agreed to build the boathouse at this site, which it is leasing from a developer for 99 years â€" for $1 a year. The developer plans to fill the rest of the property with four-story office and apartment buildings and a 16,000-foot-long riverfront park open to the public. Mr. Peterson designed the boathouse so that one of its most prominent features faces the future development â€" an entryway with a glass tower that juts a few feet forward from the facade.

The once-industrial site created some challenges. Because of questions about the stability of the soil, the building was constructed on an elaborate foundation of 50 pressure-injected concrete pilings sunk 35 feet into the ground. And because the soil carried traces of toxic materials, the contractors were required to lay a three-foot cap of clean fill on top of open spaces surrounding the boathouse.

Its future neighbors had a lot to do with the modern look of the boathouse. For a boathouse that Mount Holyoke College plans to put on a former farm, Mr. Peterson has designed a building reminiscent of a barn. But at the Tufts site, Mr. Peterson knew that the developer was planning modern-looking buildings around the boathouse. So he designed a sleek structure with a sloping, irregular roof line that angles toward the river, giving the boathouse a silhouette that resembles a ship's.

While some new boathouses are still being designed in the Victorian aesthetic, Mr. Peterson says modern designs are becoming more common. Two striking contemporary structures are the new $8.6-million, 52,000-square-foot Porter Boathouse at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (designed by Vincent James Associates of Minneapolis and KEE Architects of Madison) and the $18-million University of Washington Conibear Shellhouse renovation and addition (by the Miller/Hull Partnership of Seattle), a multi-use building that opened a year ago with more than 47,000 square feet of space. A $4.8-million boathouse at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, for which ground was broken this month, will also have a contemporary look.

At the Tufts boathouse, the design not only affords views of two-thirds of the 2,000-meter race course, which runs south from the boathouse, but also allows the early-morning sunlight to flood its upper story. The eastern and southern sides of the building have walls of windows ringed by a six-foot-deep deck protected by a roof overhang.

The overhanging roof and the overall orientation of the rectangular building â€" with the longest sides parallel to the water and the highest point at the southeast â€" were conceived with the idea of "controlling the solar gain," says Mr. Peterson. Tufts is not seeking LEED certification for the building, but Mr. Peterson says the structure features a number of eco-friendly elements, including bamboo planks for flooring in the second-story room, and ipe, a hardwood farmed in Central America, for planking on the deck. Wainscoting in the public room is maple, however; Mr. Peterson says sheets of bamboo weren't as available at an affordable price.

Mr. Peterson loves the look of the bamboo flooring but admits he is less enamored of the exposed ductwork in the ceiling â€" the result, he explains, of a cost-cutting change to the heating system that required adding additional ducts. But he says the university plans to hang an ornamental boat from the ceiling, which will make the ducts less visible. Tufts plans to use the upper-story room for meetings and indoor training for the men's and women's crew teams, as well as for university and public events.

The exterior of the building is covered with shingles made of a fiber-cement composite. Like their wood counterparts, they can be painted. Mr. Peterson says they cost more than wood shingles, but are more durable and will ultimately be easier and less expensive to maintain.

Like the boathouse, the dock is meant to be sensitive to the environment: Prohibited from building a permanent dock, Tufts is using a temporary dock of interlocking blocks made of recycled plastic. Each year members of the crew team will assemble the dock in the early spring, snapping together the 20-inch-square blocks, then take it apart for the winter. The blocks are gray and black. "We can spell 'Tufts University' in the dock," says Gary Caldwell, who supervises rowing at Tufts.

The boathouse has men's and women's locker rooms, but no lockers. Instead the team members will hang their clothes on hooks. Mr. Caldwell, who has coached crew teams since 1972 and has spent countless hours in dank and stinky locker rooms, says the absence of lockers will allow for wet clothing to dry more quickly and also leave more space in the locker room for the teams to meet.

The boathouse's raison d'être is its boat-storage area. The 48-by-84-foot space provides storage for about 30 boats, with two 23-foot-wide boat bays that are broader than most. The bays, through which the boats are carried in and out, open onto a patio that is as wide as the building itself â€" roomy enough to allow the teams to comfortably and safely swing the boats around while carrying them to the water. The patio extends to a series of narrower steps that lead down a low bluff to the dock.

Mr. Peterson, who rowed lightweight at Princeton University, says having a venue that builds crew-team spirit is important for Tufts, as it is for other institutions where crew is a relatively new sport and the teams lack a "boathouse culture." Women's crew in particular has taken off as colleges seek to develop gender equity in their intercollegiate athletics programs. In the past 10 years, the number of colleges offering crew as a sport for women has nearly doubled, to 141.

Mr. Caldwell, for his part, says Mr. Peterson's window-strewn building offers an unusual and inviting space for the crew teams, whether they are inside training or out on the Malden rowing. "From the river you can see right through the building," says Mr. Caldwell proudly. "We didn't want to build your mother's boathouse."

PHOTO (COLOR): Tufts U.'s window-filled boathouse was built on a reclaimed brownfield site on the Malden River. It replaces a tent that crew teams have used for five years.

PHOTO (COLOR): The raison d'être of any boathouse is storing the teams' shells, which can be as long as 60 feet. Above, the boathouse at Tufts U.

PHOTO (COLOR): The U. of Washington's Conibear Shellhouse was recently renovated and expanded for $18-million.

PHOTO (COLOR): The U. of Wisconsin at Madison's new Porter Boathouse was constructed on the shore of Lake Mendota.

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By Goldie Blumenstyk