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Vickie Alani
Title: Principal, CBT Architects
Age: 55
Industry experience: 32 years
Architect Vickie Alani’s specialties in the multifamily and hospitality sectors are starting to blur together, as hotel and housing developers borrow each others’ design trends. Alani has participated in 15 projects in less than two years at Boston-based CBT Architects, where she was named a principal in June. After working on award-winning projects at the Ames Hotel and Archstone North Point, she leads the amenity and interior designs of the next residential building at the 45-acre development now named Cambridge Crossing: a 469-unit apartment tower. In another high-profile project, Alani is working with a new development team on the latest attempts to redevelop and expand the vacant Alexandra Hotel in Boston’s South End.
Q: When did you first consider architecture as a career and how did you gravitate toward multifamily and hospitality as specialties?
Growing up, all I would think about was becoming an artist. I didn’t know about architecture. Both of my parents are immigrant doctors. My dad wanted me to become a medical illustrator, and my mom said, “She’ll get smart at some point and become a doctor.” I went to art school and got my bachelor’s and started doing these enormous room-sized paintings, and I decided I wanted to do interior design. I wanted to create environments. I got into Rhode Island School of Design, and my first day in the studio I had the most phenomenal professor, Michael Hayes who teaches at Harvard now, and he said, “You should transfer over and become an architect.” I said, “That’s a scary word.” He said, “You can always do interiors if you become an architect, but you can’t do architecture if you’re an interior designer.” For my first job, I worked on the renovation of some townhouses on Beacon Street, a total facade-ectomy. I sat at my desk the first few days and drew these spectacular elevations by hand. I thought I was in heaven. I could draw all day and work as an architect.
Q: How are residential designs influencing hospitality space?
A: It’s all collapsing into one. One of the reasons I loved coming to CBT is I was able to work both in the hospitality and multifamily practices. It’s about supporting the way people live and work, not such defined buckets anymore. Because people always say when they go to work, they want it to feel like home. And when they go to a hotel they want it to be like home, and when they go home, they want it to feel like a hotel.
Q: What are architects learning about what works in designing compact living spaces?
A: I’m a big proponent of diversity of housing. There isn’t one solution. For a while people were thinking this was going to be the solution to our housing crisis. There isn’t any one solution. It supports one part of the market that hasn’t been there in the past, and so there are people who want to live in the city and they just want to find the right cost. They’d rather walk to work, get rid of their car, they don’t have too much stuff yet and they want to be in the city, where the city is their amenity. The microunits really allow that to happen. They get amenities too. It’s an entry price for the lifestyle in these buildings. We have some projects where we have very little in the way of amenities, because you’re in the city. There’s a health club nearby, there are restaurants all over, there are plenty of places to find rental cars. You don’t need everything in every building.
Q: How dramatic is the repositioning project for the Hotel Indigo in the Bulfinch Triangle?
A: That used to be a Holiday Inn. It was very old and scary. It’s a total repositioning of rooms, corridors and public spaces. It’s indicative of the trend where the lobby changed from a very private space, where you walk in and you’re in the hotel and you can’t go any further, to this which is really a bar and a lounge. They want the public to come in and occupy the lobby. There’s two tiny desks on one side for check-in, but really it’s about social and communal space. We’re seeing this in every one of our projects, multifamily and hotel. And the Hotel Indigo wants to be rooted in their place, so they wanted it to feel like it’s near North Station in Boston, near the North Bennet Street School. People want to learn something when they travel. What is it like to live in Boston and experience something new?
Q: How does the next residential building at Cambridge Crossing maximize connections to the outdoors?
A: It’s 469 units, and we’re just about to start construction documents on that one. Part of the amenity story is the park. The terraces and views are located so you can actually be in the building and watch it from the terrace. And we’ve opened up the retail, which is open to the lobby as well. There’s this nice flow of public-private spaces. We’re going to do a combination of garage doors that flip up and folding doors, and a yoga room opens up to the outdoor terrace which overlooks the park. So there’s this really nice porosity.
Q: Did the plans for Mass & Main in Cambridge change during the community process and city review?
A: What we heard was that people in the neighborhood love it because it’s so authentically Cambridge. There’s this image of Central Square and these people are completely celebrating that, the alleyways, the graffiti walls, the artwork, the local nature of the retail that’s there. Their nervousness was they were going to lose that character by us coming in and building more density. What’s exciting is all the places you can traverse through the first floor. The retail spaces and lobbies are created like alleys so you can walk through the buildings to the back. It’s a very different plan than where you walk into a little lobby and there’s a massive building behind it. The alley is completely flanked with small retailers – under 500 square feet – the idea being this is really the mom-and-pop retail. It can be a cheese shop today and a hat maker in three months. It’s incubating these businesses and they could move to a larger space.
Q: What’s your next big project?
A: We’re just starting permitting on the old Hotel Alexandra in South End. It’s in terrible shape. The sandstone exterior is rock-solid, thank God. The interior is falling apart. We’re going to take out the interior and put a new building inside it and go up above. I was on South End landmarks commission 20 years ago and most of the time this building came before the commission, it was to give them violations. Windows were dropping out of the building. There was a fire. There was water damage. The exciting part now is I get to work on a solution for it. We’ve been working with the developer for a solution that brings it back to its former glory and pays for it with just the right-sized addition. The community is very skeptical because people keep coming in front of them saying, “I’m going to do this,” and then the dollars don’t work and they leave. We’ve been very conscientious about methodically going through and making sure we don’t fall into that trap.
Alani’s Five Most Inspiring Artists:
- Robert Rauschenberg
- Richard Serra
- Mark Rothko
- Cy Twombly
- Each new artist I encounter in mytravels, from graffitists in LA, textile designers in Dubai and architects in Boston
