Table Of Content
Hank Willis Thomas, the artist who conceived the centerpiece of the Kings’ entwined arms, has drawn most of the attention, both vitriol and accolades. But the project began with an invitation from MASS Design Group to join its entry for the memorial, and the piece’s presence on the Common is a result of their partnership. I heard someone say recently, “I don’t know what I think until I write it.” Thoughts and ideas are sometimes amorphous until you write or draw them. Like designing and drawing, the details and clarity don’t resolve themselves until you really dig in. Architecture and comparative literature are both ways to explore the world. Celebrating 10 years of work, our first monograph highlights the projects, people, and partnerships that have formed the backbone of MASS Design Group since our beginnings.
Education School Announces Interim Dean
We have been working to apply these lessons in a number of design projects with community development groups in Massachusetts and New York and are finding that leveraging these design principles has multiple benefits. We thank the innumerable partners, supporters, friends, and team members that made our first 10 years possible, paving the way for decades of project, impact, and collaborations to come. We are a team of over 200 architects, landscape architects, engineers, builders, furniture designers, makers, writers, filmmakers, and researchers representing 20 countries across the globe. We believe in expanding access to design that is purposeful, healing, and hopeful. The exhibition is organized around the themes of engaging, healing, fostering, conserving, and marking, and features completed buildings, proposed projects, and applied research initiatives along with photographs, videos, renderings, and models. The heart of the memorial is a pavilion held up by six-foot-tall rusted steel pillars, each bearing the name of a county where racial killings occurred and the identities of the victims.
Seeking Abundance: MASS at The Architectural League of New York
Caitlin Taylor, based in Poughkeepsie, leads regional food network research and development—work intended to address the global challenges of climate change and supply-chain fragility. One project involves the development of a campus for the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas—what Taylor called “the most amazing group of agricultural mad scientists,” dedicated to fostering prairie biodiversity by developing new strains of perennial food grains. A second involves the adaptive reuse of an old auto body shop as a grocery store and teaching kitchen for the Kingston, New York, Food Co-op.
From Rwanda to Boston Common: the humanitarian mission of MASS Design
The firm’s work has grown to include education and housing, infused with the same ethos. I am also engaged in our Affordable Housing practice, near and dear to my heart. As a nationally recognized design leader, researcher, writer, and educator, Katie leads by example. Before joining MASS in early 2020, Swenson was vice president of Design & Sustainability at Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit organization that invests in community development, as well as an Enterprise Rose Fellow and Loeb Fellow. In addition, she founded the Charlottesville Community Design Center to bring together designers and community planners.
MASS.Build
We believe that every project has a mission and we collaborate with our partners throughout the design process — from early visioning through project completion — to develop and implement a shared vision to achieve that mission. We do this through architecture, landscape design, furniture design, engineering, planning, research, construction, film, and community engagement. The J. J. Carroll Housing Redevelopment project advances the vision of aging in community. The 142-unit age-restricted affordable housing community in Boston is thoughtfully designed to help residents live better and longer lives. MASS worked with 2Life Communities to develop a model for high density housing that prioritizes resident connections and communal activities linked to aging well.
The Poughkeepsie office, or studio, was its first U.S. outpost beyond its Boston headquarters. The Santa Fe studio, which focuses on native communities, was created in 2019 (see “Learning from Indian Country,” page 70). The firm’s defining domestic project to date is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama, a searing monument to black Americans murdered in lynchings and victimized in other ways because of their race. “The single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century,” one critic called it.
"Architecture Can Heal": MASS Design Group's Katie Swenson on Building Equity Together
It’s hard to underestimate how exciting the growth and development of MASS has been. Watching MASS put theory into practice, again and again, and continue to expand its ambitions has been thrilling. The Embrace is inspired by a photograph of the Kings, who met in Boston, at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1964. The memorial depicts only the Kings’ shoulders, arms, and hands, perched on their elbows, wrapped in a hug. No heads, no faces, no torsos—a 22-foot-tall monument concerned not with rendering recognizable people but love, an emotion central to the Kings’ lives and purpose. It is the work of sculptor Hank Willis Thomas on behalf of Embrace Boston, which conceived of the memorial and raised the money for it.
MASS Celebrates Inaugural U.S. Healthcare Project
Bjarke Ingels Group designs a mass timber cube structure for the University of Kansas - Building Design + Construction
Bjarke Ingels Group designs a mass timber cube structure for the University of Kansas.
Posted: Thu, 25 Apr 2024 19:42:23 GMT [source]
The first floor is devoted to commercial space—and a nonprofit community health center. I believe America has a future where everyone has a place to call home—not just any place, but a place that promotes health and is environmentally friendly, a place that provides not only shelter but dignity, identity, and grounding in a community. To do that we need to commit to a national housing policy that reflects our deepest care for each other. The right to housing is recognized in many countries, and in the universal declaration of human rights. The US must create a federal housing policy that ensures equitable access to high quality housing. But, as we know, love starts at home, and states and cities must do the policy work to ensure that federal dollars are invested in housing that reflects the cultural and ecological values of diverse communities.
Leadership
Carroll affordable housing project for the elderly, under construction in Boston’s Brighton section, is a case in point. A project of the nonprofit 2Life Communities and the Boston Housing Authority, the Carroll design starts with the most efficient shape—a rectangle—and breaks it into five offset blocks, or neighborhoods, linked by a central corridor. The result brings more light into what will be a larger, more densely populated building than the outdated 64-unit structure it is replacing, while maximizing the opportunity for outdoor courtyards and green space. A playscape outside the main entrance is intended to draw in nearby families.
’10, traveled with Murphy to Butaro for his second visit, they already thought of themselves as co-founders. But in March 2008, when the students presented their first plan to Farmer, he told them it looked like a barracks. Today MASS Design has a $20 million operating budget and employs 207 people who work on more than 100 active projects. Nearly half its total staff, almost 90 percent of them African, are based in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The firm’s international portfolio has grown to include the Maternity Waiting Village in Malawi, the GHESKIO Tuberculosis Hospital in Haiti, and the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture, the world’s first carbon-positive university. MASS Design Group was founded on the understanding that architecture’s influence reaches beyond individual buildings.
Design is led by our team of product and interior designers, and done in collaboration with our network of artisans to prioritize local materials, showcase local craft techniques, and minimize the carbon footprint. This entrepreneurial model encourages and supports local artisans and material suppliers, contributes to the regional economy, and assists in the creation of new supply chains. Solving practical issues is only the skeleton of architectural practice; how to solve those issues in a way that inspires positive human experience is its substance. MASS’s first project, the Butaro District Hospital, finished in 2011, is a cluster of low-slung buildings nestled into a Rwandan mountainside and centered around a massive umuvumu tree. It grounds the hospital in its spectacular environs, an anchor to the natural world. Built on a foundation of the lava rock that lies underfoot, the hospital orbits a lush central courtyard and draws in views and natural light from the surrounding valley, a reflection of verdant, biodiverse vibrancy.
But when MASS arrived on the scene, the ideas behind social impact design accelerated. MASS embodied the ethos we were calling for, but they were doing it at a new and very exciting scale. In 2021, The American Institute of Architects honored MASS Design Group with the 2022 AIA Architecture Firm Award. In 2020, MASS was named the Architecture Innovator of the Year by the Wall Street Journal, for our origins in healthcare and commitment to architecture as a medium for healing. In 2019, Architect Magazine ranked MASS fourth in its list of Top 50 Firms in Design and in 2017, MASS was awarded the National Design Award in Architecture, given each year by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Coming to MASS in 2020 as a Senior Principal has allowed me to part of the question facing the firm, “OK, what’s MASS 2.0? ” How do we look ahead over the next 10 years to not only design projects, but to design a firm that can constantly deliver on its mission to research, build, and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity. The ability to bring great people together is one of many attributes Murphy’s colleagues said they will miss. At the same time, the firm’s leaders see an opportunity to make its collaborative essence clearer.
