AWARDS
WATERFIELD BLOCK
The Waterfield Block is a commercial block in Winchester’s Town Center bounded by the Town Green and by the commuter rail that has allowed Winchester to flourish as a bedroom community of Boston. While Winchester itself possesses many positive attributes typical of a classic New England community — stately civic buildings, commercial enterprise, residential building stock, a park system and waterway, a comfortable pedestrian scale — the Waterfield Block faces challenges that are also typical of these communities as they age and grow. Characterized by incomplete commercial edges and low-density surface parking, it is dominated by the commuter rail viaduct, a massive, elevated stone structure that regrettably bifurcates the Town Center.
PROJECT LOCATION
Winchester, MA
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PROJECT SIZE
400,000 SF
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PROJECT TYPE
Urban Design, Workspace, Residential, Infrastructure
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CLIENT
Town of Winchester
AW’s urban design proposal introduces a strategy for repairing this rift and strengthening the Town’s fabric: co-opt the viaduct and transform it into a compelling urban attractor that energizes both public and semi-public life. Through a series of subtractive operations on the viaduct’s mass, the Town Center’s geography is drawn into and through the infrastructure, establishing a new context for commerce, for a series of urban vestibules, and for living.
At the scale of “Town,” an otherwise modest, unmanned rail shed becomes a significant, elongated, translucent, landmark that celebrates rather than conceals. It establishes a series of localized pedestrian and vehicular connections that marry the urban plan’s different scales, and creates two perpendicular, symbolic conditions: a punctuating moment along the continuity of the rail line and a defining epicenter of Town life. A neglected piece of infrastructure becomes a contemporary manifestation of optimism.
