Natick, MA 1954, by Canadian Breweries, Engineering Division, renovated 1982 by Beckstoffer, Hunter & Associates
When Carling Brewery opened on the shores of Lake Cochituate, it was hailed as “America’s Most Modern Brewery. The plant employed 250 union employees to create their signature Black Label beer using water from the nearby lake. After twenty years however, the industrial landscape of the United States was changing and what was once a thriving brewery was closed, leaving a highly specialized, over 300,000 square foot facility obsolete. The brokerage firm, Leggat McCall and Werner, struggled to find a new tenant and were forced to get creative with their rapidly aging factory. Instead of pitching it as an industrial space, the firm hired Bechstoffer, Hunter & Associates for a $3.6 million renovation that would transform the cavernous factory floor into state of the art offices. This gamble paid off when growing microcomputer firm Prime Computers signed a sole tenant lease for the entire facility during construction.
The conversion involved stripping the massive ‘brew house’ of the old plant and replacing its 240-foot by 480-foot factory floor with two stories of office space laid out around a central atrium with a 1600 square foot skylight. The only demolished building had housed the boiler for the factory which was replaced with a two story office space built on the same foundation. Both buildings were coated in a matching precast concrete panel and banded windows and were connected with a glass sky bridge.
The former brewery would be the headquarters for Prime Computer until the company collapsed in the early 90s and the lease would be then taken over by medical equipment manufacturer Boston Scientific. This cycle of reuse finally came to an end in 2012 when Boston Scientific consolidated into its Marlborough, MA campus and the office was bought by the mathematics software giant MathWorks who were based just down Route 9 in Natick. In 2015, they announced plans to build a brand new campus on the lakeside site and the historic building was torn down in 2018.
sources:
“Carling Brewery” Natick Historical Society
Anthony Yudis “Prime idea for a brewery” the Boston Globe, Nov. 9, 1980
the “Prime Computer Alumni” Facebook Page
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