A puzzle awaits the residents who tear themselves away from family and seasonal distractions to attend a meeting this week to review designs for the renovation of Town Hall and Hildreth House. But it’s a puzzle whose final image cannot be rendered until Harvard residents and their representatives agree on which pieces to include, and their number, size, and shape.
The meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, Dec. 14, at 7 p.m. in Volunteers Hall at the Harvard Public Library and will be led by members of the town’s Municipal Building Committee and architects from LLB Architects, the firm hired to develop schematic designs for the two buildings. The forum is one of only two planned for the winter months at which citizens can influence the shape—literally—of the renovations.
By late January, the committee will have settled on a pair of conceptual designs and will be refining their physical cost estimates for approval by the Selectmen and, eventually, Town Meeting.
Workshop attendees will be asked to weigh in on two questions: what programs do various town stakeholders—employees, elected officials, committee and board volunteers, and citizens—want to see housed in the two buildings, and what schemes for accommodating those programs are acceptable. At the meeting, architects will present three conceptual designs for each building, but reaching consensus on which programs to include and which to reduce or omit is the paramount goal of the meeting, say town officials.
In a meeting of the building committee last week at, which only two members were present, LLB presented two sketches to attendees that dramatically depict the Town Hall and Hildreth house puzzles. The drawings depict the programs that stakeholders have asked to be included as well as the existing footprints of the two building. A copy of the sketches accompanies this article.
The word “program” is a term that the building committee members and their consultants use to refer to the offices, meeting and storage spaces, public areas and support facilities, such as elevators and rest rooms, that the renovated buildings must accommodate. Some program elements, like the number and size of meeting rooms or offices, are more flexible than others, such as elevators, handicap accessible bathrooms and other infrastructure needed to bring a building up to code. The program elements are, in effect, the pieces of the puzzle.
“We can design what the town wants want,” LLB architect Drayton Fair told the building committee and other observers at a sparsely attended meeting last Wednesday. “But you have to tell us what to include and what to leave out.”
The scope of the problem can be seen in the program sketches for each building that accompany this article. The first drawing, “Town Hall Program,” displays, in colored bubbles, the programs that various stakeholders want to see housed in that building. The size of each bubble represents, to scale, the number of square feet a program would require if implemented as specified.
The blue bubbles, as the drawing key states, represent public spaces, the counters where citizens come to pay taxes, speak with a town official, or conduct public business. The green bubbles represent offices and meeting spaces for town employees, as well as elected and appointed town committees, from the Selectmen to the sewer and historical commissions. This so-called “staff” space includes the town vault, currently housed in a building adjacent to town hall.
Yellow bubbles represent building infrastructure, some of which is fixed by building codes and state law. In the statement of intent, adopted prior to Town Meeting in April, Selectmen said they would allow a renovated Town Hall to exceed its existing footprint only if doing so is necessary to bring the building up to code.
For the moment, the size of the Town Hall puzzle—the total area available to the various pieces, however they are arranged—is limited by the area of the building as it exists today. A sketch of its shape area, drawn to the same scale as the bubbles, can be found in the upper right hand corner of the “Town Hall—Programs” sketch. The building has two floors, so the total area available for town hall programs is roughly equal to two Town Halls.
The second drawing that accompanies this article is titled “Hildreth House—Program” and is organized like the drawing for Town Hall. But in this case, there is already agreement on which programs the building will accommodate. These elements were negotiated last spring and their size reduced.
They clearly do not fit within the floor space of the current building, a former summer residence (See the sketch in the upper right-hand corner Hildreth House—Programs”). To accommodate new program space, an addition will be required. Unlike Town Hall, however, taxpayers will fund only renovations and code improvements for Hildreth House. The cost of an addition is to be paid for by private donations.
Since the total square feet required by the Council on Aging’s programs is a relatively fixed number and because most of the new program space will be housed in the planned addition, designs for the renovated building are likely to look more or less the same, differing only in where the addition is placed on the site.
Lucy Wallace, a Council on Aging liaison to the building committee, said last week that ease of access, preservation of landscaping, location of parking and other site concerns were likely to be more important choices than the configuration of the addition.
In a phone interview, architect Fair said he hoped that he and building committee members would leave the meeting Wednesday evening with a clearer sense of what was important to residents about each of the buildings.
Following the meeting, the architects at LLB will refine their conceptual drawings, and, one week later, ask the committee to choose one, or some combination of each, for the two buildings.
Building committee meetings are open to the public and the agenda can always be found on the town web site, but residents will not formally be asked to weigh in on the Town Hall and Hildreth House projects again until mid-January.