102-108 Westford Street

In adapting the original, single Passive House Triple Decker to the site on Westford Street, Noyes and MacFarlane faced a different set of site constraints and market requirements. Yet they were able to recycle the construction documents from Allston Street to a surprising degree, despite some customizations.

To take advantage of a larger site, the team doubled the building size by mirroring the original single Triple Decker along its long edge, creating a duplicate Triple Decker separated by a marriage wall. The implication of this was that an extra bedroom window, originally on the long side wall, was removed and the bathroom against the marriage wall lost a window. Additionally, the team decided to forgo Passive House certification and instead go for the opt-in Massachusetts Stretch energy code, which impacted the HVAC design. For Westford Street, the team also reorganized the closet space and kitchen sink location to increase the living/dining area. In the grand scheme, the unit designs for Westford Street were nearly identical to the ones at Allston Street and the minor changes took the architecture team at BRHA very little time to implement at the schematic level.

The more significant design work involved adapting the rest of the building to the Westford site topography and neighborhood. Most existing triple deckers, including the prior one on Allston Street, have a basement that can conveniently house the advanced electrical panels and sprinkler systems that are needed for an energy-efficient and space-efficient triple decker redo. However, 102-108 Westford sits atop a ledge and the previous building had no basement. To avoid a deep excavation, the team decided on a crawl space instead as the building foundation, which meant tweaking the original entryway vestibule design to accommodate small closets for the panels and sprinkler system. For the building cladding, at the request of Lowell city officials to match the character of the neighborhood, BRHA designed a look to elicit traditional New England, departing from Allston Street’s more modern facade.

In sum, about 75% of the final building plans were repeated between Allston Street and Westford Street, resulting in significant time savings for the architects compared with designing a building without standardized unit plans as the starting point. The modular units were nearly identical to the earlier versions at Allston Street, with the majority of architectural and engineering work done for the foundations and building exterior.

However, BRHA documented further time savings when it came to managing the submittals and requests for information from the modular manufacturer. Even though Westford Street engaged a different modular manufacturer, RCM, than Allston Street, many of the same clarifying questions from RCM had already been addressed and the architects could speedily turn answers around. Had both projects used the same modular manufacturer in addition to very similar building designs, this part of the process would have been even more expeditious. BRHA estimates that around 40-50% of project design fees can be saved by applying standardized unit designs to new projects.