How Atelier Cho Thompson Revamped EQ’s Boston Office

Christina Cho Yoo and Ming Thompson sat back-to-back in their studio course at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Upon earning their masters’, they started their architecture careers at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson before establishing Atelier Cho Thompson in San Francisco in 2014. Today, the woman-owned business has grown to a team of 14, most of whom are female. As for project type, the studio is all over the map, literally and figuratively. Cho Yoo, who also has an engineering degree from Stanford University, oversees West Coast work, which ranges from the renovation of a Bay Area home to developing innovative learning spaces for a Houston school. Thompson, who teaches at the Yale School of Architecture, runs East Coast projects out of ACT’s New Haven, Connecticut, office, which recently completed 179 Lincoln Street, the reimagining of 8,000 square feet of shared spaces in a 19th-century office building in Boston.

Designed by Peabody & Stearns in 1899, the full-block beaux arts edifice originally housed the United Shoe Machinery Company. Hundreds of years later, it had been converted to a multi-tenant configuration and purchased by real estate company EQ Office. ACT’s second project for EQ, the scope entailed renovating sections of the building’s five floors, including the lobby, into a mix of areas supporting socializing and cross-pollinating. The structure, as Thompson recounts, “had been mostly abandoned and misused,” and was devoid of today’s must-have amenities. To draw new and improve conditions for existing tenants, her rehab plan was to “offer opportunities beyond what’s experienced working from home.”