TGAS Celebrates A Successful 2024

2024 was a banner year for TGAS. No, we’re not referring to the blue banners dangling on the light-poles along Mt. Auburn Street that proclaim our name. We’re talking about the major strides we made this year: landing new jobs, groundbreaking new construction, completing state-of-the-art buildings, hiring & promoting staff, and speaking at public safety conferences.

But our biggest accomplishment this year was the fulfillment of a dream: kickstarting Galante Design Studio with a pop-up gallery in Harvard Square showcasing our Atlas Obscured Collection of chairs made from lattice cutouts of archival maps of famous cities. The craftsmanship of the wood and colored aluminum chairs was an instant hit with the public for the sense of place and the aura of history they give to common household items. To boot, the chairs were cited as Highlighted Submissions in Buildner’s Architect’s Chair Competition by ArchDaily magazine. We are planning other promotions for these chairs, which we hope will lead to the creation of other “Objects with Meaning” for our design portfolio (some are in the works; stay tuned).

In the meantime, we continue our hot pursuit for the design jobs that are our lifeblood. Our efforts landed four (4) major opportunities for us, including:

• Boston Engine Company 3, Boston, MA: a continuation of our long-term liaison with the City of Boston Public Facilities Department that enabled us to design a Boston EMS Facility and renovate Oak Square’s historic Boston Engine Company 51 in years past.
• Exeter Police Headquarters & Fire Substation, Exeter, NH: a consolidation of police and fire facilities, designed to accommodate the town’s 45-plus percentage population increase and 413% increase in emergency service calls. The design will focus on streamlined programming to promote safe transportation of detainees, efficient ventilation systems for the fitness room and armory, and sustainable building practices to make the HQ a net-zero carbon emission facility.
• MetroWest Regional Emergency Communications Center, Westborough, MA: We are renovating a historic, formerly abandoned municipal building into a state-of-the-art communications facility for the town’s police, fire, and EMS response needs.
• Orleans Master Plan, Orleans, MA: We will conduct a feasibility study for public safety, public school and recreational department needs for the Town of Orleans, focusing on a fire rescue station, a school building, and a recreational/community facility there. This is a follow-up to our previous feasibility study examining the needs of the Orleans Fire Department, which went beyond air quality to detect multiple deficiencies in programmatic use of space that were hazardous to firefighters.

Projects we broke ground on:

• Our net-zero-emissions gut renovation and historic restoration of the historic Cambridge Fire Headquarters, one of the nation’s few Class 1 Fire Department Headquarters. Our work includes documenting the building’s nearly 100 years of history while programming for the expanded new facility and creating Building Information Models (BIM) to upgrade it. The City of Cambridge holds to LEED Gold environmental standards, so our process involves energy modeling and calculations to convert a 92-year-old building envelope into a 21^st-century one. This project gave rise to another first: the first erection of a temporary modular fire station in Cambridge, to house the Cambridge Fire Department and its Engine 1, Ladder 1, Rescue 1 and Dive Rescue Unit firetrucks offsite during construction (see below).
• The Belmont Ice Rink, under construction by Belmont High School on Concord Avenue. Its net-zero-energy ice-making system will be the first of its kind in the country. Glycol, an alcoholic chemical compound, increases the evaporation-condensation point of the CO₂ used in the cooling of the ice, keeping the rink’s ice sheet frozen longer in an environmentally sustainable way: it does not deplete the ozone layer, and it has a global warming potential of 1, unlike the average rink’s 40-something potential. Also, the rink will be built with modular pre-engineered steel sheets, columns and supporting elements, all of which make up a kit of parts prefabbed in a factory, transported to the site, and assembled on site. This includes a special web of bents, beams, trusses and purlins that allows for a 40,000 SF volume and an unobstructed view of the action during Boston Marauders high-school hockey games as well as public skate-ins. We hope to have the new rink completed by September 2025.

Projects we completed:

• The first fire department headquarters for the Town of Northbridge, MA, in its 250-year history. This project includes a special station for vehicles combating the brushfires that plagued the Commonwealth last month.
• A new fire department headquarters for the Town of Dennis, MA. It is designed to reflect the Cape/New England Barn style of the town’s historic architecture, yet it provides marked improvement over the old facility in response time, responders’ amenities and accessories, and community amenities.
• A new Mahoney’s Garden Center in Brighton with a vast greenhouse of plants, vases, furniture, and stoneware galore. This is the end result of our long-term collaboration with owner Tom Mahoney.
• The renovation of the historic Belmont Town Hall.

Our fearless leader Ted Galante was well represented at two conferences: F.I.E.R.O. and Station Design Conference.

And we welcomed to our office:

• Dolapo Beckley as Architectural Job Captain. Dolapo is an experienced Architectural Designer with a demonstrated history of working with different types of architectural software, including Revit, AutoCAD, Rhino, SketchUp, and Photoshop. She holds an M.Arch. from Boston Architectural College.
• Todd Larson as a Marketing Assistant. Todd brings many years of architectural marketing and journalism experience to TGAS. He writes proposals, blog posts, and articles for publication as the linguistic strongarm of our Marketing Department. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College.
• Hana Oji as Architect and Assistant Project Manager. Hana has a background in affordable housing and university student centers, as well as a B.Sc. in Architecture with a concentration in Urbanism from Wentworth Institute of Technology and an M.Arch. from Boston Architectural College.
• Katie Taggard as a Marketing Assistant. Katie brings a solid background in graphic design, particularly in Adobe Creative Suite, and a degree in Public Communication and Communication Design from the University of Vermont.

And we promoted:

• Simona Bartali to Senior Designer. After 20 years as an architect in Italy and 2½ years at TGAS, Simona now works primarily on residential projects, including a Beacon Hill townhouse and a Cambridge home. Her previous design work includes a fire station in Seekonk, Massachusetts, the Belmont Ice Rink (see above), and the pedestrian bridge connecting the new Yankee Line bus headquarters and maintenance facility with the company’s renovated office at 20 Scanlon St. in Randolph (see above). Simona holds a degree in architecture from Università degli Studi di Firenze (University of Florence), Italy.
• Lizamie Bustillo to Chief Operating Officer of all three of our entities (TGAS, Design Build Studio LLC, Galante Design Studio). After serving as Business Development Manager for TGAS for four years, Lizamie is now more of the “biz whiz” than ever, especially as the main curator of our new Galante Design Studio pop-up gallery (see above), where she introduces guests to the “mapped” chairs and invites them to sit down on one or two of them to get a feel for them. She brings solid executive leadership skills with extensive C-suite experience, specializing in steering company operations, sales, and strategic transformations, as well as startup team management expertise and DEI initiative pioneering experience.
• Ewan Ellis to Assistant Project Manager. After working his way up the TGAS ranks from Designer to Senior Designer, following stints as Architectural Assistant, Associate Designer and Designer for Cummings Properties, Ewan has earned his stripes in a supervisory capacity, drafting and managing the completion of construction documents and managing coordination among consultants. He holds a B.Arch. from the Illinois Institute of Technology, the legendary midcentury modern campus designed by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe.
• Evelyn Jin to Personal Assistant to Ted Galante. After two (?) years as an Architectural Designer for TGAS, Evelyn provides administrative support by managing Ted’s calendar and communication. She holds a degree in Architectural Studies from Boston University.
• William Oakes to Director of Marketing. After two years as a Marketing Specialist for TGAS, Will is now spearheading the efforts of our marketing team. To this new role he brings a wide variety of experience: media technology management, video editing, set design and production, and photography, which makes him the all-around go-to person for our marketing initiatives.
• Christina Tanios to Assistant Project Manager. After moving up the TGAS ladder from Intern to Designer to Senior Designer, Tina has attained her goal to be an Assistant Project Manager, drafting and managing the completion of construction documents and managing coordination among consultants. She holds a degree in architecture from the Lebanese American University.

We at TGAS thank all our trusted clients, communities and neighborhoods for making all this and more possible. But most of all, we thank our dedicated team. In Ted’s words:

“Ultimately, it is clear this place has unlimited potential, since we are a small office and quite tight knit. I believe that working together, caring for the growth of this place and each other, we become more of what everyone wants to be part of; an engaged, dynamic, meaningful place where we solve design problems in the most interesting of ways.  With your focus, we can do that more and more, and everyone grows in all ways possible.”