Client

Overview

The Amazon of its day, the former Sears Roebuck & Company building opened in 1928 as a distribution center and warehouse in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood. Today the building has been repositioned by Elkus Manfredi Architects into a destination that honors the building’s past while reinventing it for today’s work/play world. Renamed 401 Park, the building is a new hub drawing visitors, office workers, and residents with high-end local cuisine, boutique retail, gathering spots, and expansive contemporary workplaces.

Elkus Manfredi Architects was master planner, architect, and interior designer for the reimagining of the massive, one-million-sf structure at 401 Park Street. The team opened up the ground floor, revealing the original concrete columns, ceilings, and floors, and designed a 1920s-style iron staircase to complement the building’s original features. The streetscape is enhanced with ground-floor retail tenants and a pedestrian-friendly entrance and landscaping, while the interior boasts a large food hall operated by Lisbon’s Time Out Market.

Goals

Elkus Manfredi’s design team worked closely with art consultant Emily Santangelo on the artwork for the project, commissioning Boston artist Timmy Sneaks to create a mural on a wall located on the parking-garage level of the main stair to give arriving visitors to 401 Park their first experience of the environment they’re entering. Aligning with the goals for the artwork, the mural acts as an extension of the vision for the entire building: a contemporary interpretation that honors the roots of the building while placing it firmly in the present. The artist worked with old found black and white photographs of the Sears building and parking lot filled with cars from the late 1940s, blowing the photos up, wheat-pasting them onto the wall, and painting historic cartoon characters from the Looney Tunes Series that date back to the early 1930s, when the Sears building was built. Santangelo’s team traveled to the Texas Motor Speedway, the largest car parts swap meet in the country to source grilles, doors, and hoods of old Packards, Buicks, Chevys, and Fords, along with vintage gas pumps to stand alongside the garage mural. Sneaks incorporated the car parts into the mural, giving it sculptural dimension and detail.