Oscar Mertz thinks big — and small. The Planning Board candidate spent 33 years at Boston-based Elkus Manfredi, one of world’s preeminent architecture firms, working on projects — retail, mixed-use, residential, entertainment — all over the world. However, when he and his wife, Cathy, bought their current Needham home (they had first moved to town in 1993), they went small, choosing a modest older house on Rybury Hillway. The block is now an example of the tear-down trend in town; the Mertz’s home is only one of two older, smaller houses on the street.
Mertz’s experience with designing and building larger-scale development led to his belief that the Planning Board has an important role in the economic and commercial health of the town. His block, though, may have been more influential in prompting him to volunteer for the Large House Review Study Committee, which was voted in to place by Town Meeting and spent last year looking at the pros and cons of Needham’s current new home construction bylaws. At the beginning of this year, the Large House committee made a set of bylaw recommendations to the current Planning Board. If they are implemented, there would be new limits on the largest sized homes that could be built on Needham’s smaller (Single Residence B) lots. The proposed bylaws include a graduated scale of building footprint and bulk intended to make new homes proportional to their lots.
Mertz is at least a third-generation creative. “My dad was a professor of art, my mother was a jewelry designer and my grandfather was an interior designer, so I was sort of genetically predisposed to be in some form of creative outlet.”
He grew up in Pennsylvania and attended a Quaker school from kindergarten through high school. He said it defined his interest in collaboration. “The Quaker schools are very community-oriented. That was a foundation to the school. So it was a great environment. I was there for 13 years.”
But it wasn’t until college at Princeton that he began thinking about architecture. “I was drawn to a class as a sophomore called the History of the Built Environment. It was about civilizations and building and the growth of urbanity and cities.”
The Mertzes moved to Boston in the mid-1980s after Oscar had finished architecture school. “I went to grad school first, then Cathy went to law school second.” She was attending Northeastern, and Oscar landed his first architecture job. They moved to Needham when their son, Noah, was born.
For decades, Mertz focused mostly on his career and family, with tennis mixed in (“I have yet to try pickleball”). When Noah became active in an advocacy group called Equal Justice Needham while he was at Needham High, though, Oscar paid attention. “I got involved because I was interested as an architect in working with EJN and it had a housing interest. So we became advocates for housing.”
It dovetailed with his professional work, at least on the planning side, which led to volunteer work on Needham’s MBTA solutions. He thinks the plan that was repealed was hard to convey because change over time is hard to visualize.
“The life cycle for planning is 5, 10, 20 years,” he said.
In retrospect, Mertz says the entire process — from the research and design work to the repeal and the plan that was adopted — was good for Needham. “It has given us good stuff to work with and now build on. Now it means we do need to do this as a community. We need to have everybody at the table.”
He believes his practical experience can help. “Some people come at planning, either going through a sort of city planner approach to education where you’re studying systems and you’re doing things on data-driven analysis. And then there’s more of the inside out, which is as an architect and a planner.”
While he did not design single-family homes, “I did everything but. We did a lot of multifamily, we did research laboratories, we did hospitality, we did mixed use development, which was all over the world — environments that could be sort of destinations like indoor-outdoor retail, entertainment-driven shopping environments.
Mertz worked on local projects such as the Linden Square development in Wellesley that created a new retail and restaurant destination in the town. He worked on national projects including a neighborhood in West Palm Beach, Fla., that combined housing, retail and restaurants and The Grove in LA that created a town-like “Main Street” in a neighborhood that did not have one.
“We’re studying how to create dynamic environments that have multiple uses. It’s a more dynamic understanding of the business model. It’s just a different kind of planning, but it’s less systems and more ground-based.”
It’s also inevitably limited in scope. “The nature of the profession is that you are working with clients who have budgetary goals. They have visionary goals, they’ve got project goals, they’ve got limitations. So you’re being listeners, you’re trying to balance a lot of different forces and you’re trying to understand and build collaborative coalitions and, and understand how to compromise.” The City Place development in West Palm Beach, Mertz said, was a public-private partnership, but the town put in about the amount it would have taken to build a parking garage and private developers invested ten times as much.
After decades of high-powered design, Mertz left Elkus Manfredi, but not the profession. He’s been teaching at the Wentworth Institute of Technology and working on design projects independently or as a consultant. He and Cathy travel to visit Noah, who now lives in New Mexico. He could be scaling back and taking up crafts or music or the arts. But he doesn’t seem ready to think that small.
Save as PDF