copyright 2005 Architecture Boston, Boston Society of Architects
If you want to be a star, you need to figure out what makes you shine. Some of us glow from dumb luck, others are truly talented, and then there’s the Timothy Love brand of wattage: the fabulously self-conscious, mega-intelligent, super-ironic formula for fame and fortune, wholly owned by Utile, a subsidiary of the Tim Love machine.
You may know Love as the youth hired by Machado-Silvetti to run the sprawling Getty Museum project, or later, as the pizza-bearing project manager who got an entire neighborhood behind the “radical” design of the Allston Branch library. In his latest incarnation, Love is the president, vice-president, and treasurer of Utile, Inc., an architecture firm in Downtown Crossing, Boston. It seems during his tenure at SOM in New York, and then at M-S, Love had a lot of time to think about what’s wrong with the classic star-firm paradigm. When Love started Utile three years ago, his manifesto was a business plan, not a design philosophy.
The second slide Love showed his audience at the BSA Conversation on January 11 was not a sexy FormZ rendering of an un-built project. What he showed was the inelegant business-cycle chart of his company, ostensibly written on the back of a napkin. This is Love’s version of the Gettysburg address, the work of the genius hastily scrawled for lesser minds to admire, awestruck. But don’t be fooled.
This chart revealed that Love is setting about the job of kicking “the academic establishment” on its indigent rear-end. He approaches developers by selling them on his own pre-researched development schemes on pre-researched plots. He is fluent in developer speak, tossing around words like “pro-forma” and “net-to-gross calculation”. He can (and has) build a 24-unit condo building, with parking and 261 identical windows, for $108 per square foot. His looks at parcel ownership maps the way normal architects look at figure-ground plans. He mingles with Massport and other big owners/planners, does anything for them, trying to position himself ahead of the RFP. His hope is to ultimately bypass the RFP step altogether by being at the rightest place at the rightest time. He pursues grants with proposals shrewdly designed to appeal to his market-driven clients. He will even work for free to demonstrate to a reluctant developer the Utile cost benefit.
So how’s the architecture going? Love showed two projects in construction: the aforementioned condominiums, and a new block of townhouses, both in South Boston. This isn’t shiny magazine material. It’s a little like McDonald’s Big Mac: scientifically researched, analyzed, and marketed to appeal to the broadest possible client pool, but still appearing somehow homespun and simple. Maybe that’s not quite fair. Tim Love is a grown-up, and he knows good design from bad. Maybe his brand of architecture (thus far) is a built version of the Arch Deluxe: an upscale burger for the more sophisticated palette.
