Table Of Content
As a visitor enters the pavilion, the floor falls away, with more pillars, now suspended, overhead—leaving the unmistakable impression of walking beneath corpses. In the central courtyard, it’s the visitors who feel as if they are being judged by the pillars, as silent onlookers. The whole amounts to an immersive experience of recognition, discomfort, reflection, and transformation—a confrontation with the past intended to create hope for the future. A second set of matching pillars rests on the ground outside; EJI invited every county to claim its own pillar and bring it home. That fall, when Farmer’s assistant called to ask if Murphy could design a hospital, he turned to his classmates—literally; he took the call at the GSD—and asked if they could help.
Leadership
Today, MASS Design serves as architect for Scenic Hudson’s new $25 million headquarters in a renovated factory building on the Fall Kill, across the street from the east entrance to the region’s biggest tourist attraction, the Walkway Over the Hudson state park. Every year, more than 600,000 people visit the walkway, an old rail bridge—then leave. With a park along the Fall Kill and exhibit space, room for public events, conferences, and meetings, the headquarters has the potential to serve as the first bead on a string of redevelopment projects leading along a liberated river to the heart of the city. With its reliance on natural ventilation and light, as well as the adaptive use of an undervalued local resource—abandoned brick buildings—the design reflects Butaro’s lessons. At the National Building Museum exhibition, which opened almost two years ago, “The Embrace” is tucked in a far corner, alongside MASS’s stirring National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, a monument to enslaved people murdered in the South. High-profile memorials garner headlines, but the foundation of the firm’s work is in Africa, building accessible health care facilities designed to foster dignity and trust.
Partners
Read our op-ed in The Achitect’s Newspaper, “Lead with a mission-first design process to provide affordable housing,” here. MASS Design’s memorials lab is also responsible for such works as the Gun Violence Memorial Project, another collaboration with Thomas, unveiled in Chicago in 2019. But it’s a third collaboration involving Thomas, among other artists, that has drawn the most acclaim.
New Kennedy School Dean Announced
MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) believes that architecture has a critical role to play in supporting communities to confront history, shape new narratives, collectively heal and project new possibilities for the future. The response team will leverage lessons learned from the last ten years of working in infectious disease settings and will engage key thought leaders in design and healthcare. In the midst of our current global pandemic, we seek to bring designers and architects to support the fight to keep everyone safe. We’re dedicating resources to form a core COVID-19 Response Team, who will be available to help our partners on the front lines, and developing a set of guides that can serve as a resource to all.
The community-committed Poughkeepsie team members envision their work as “a kind of replicable model” for repairing battered cities. I first encountered MASS in 2010 at a Structures for Inclusion conference at Howard University. Michael Murphy presented the Butaro Hospital work, which was then under construction. From 2000, when I entered the profession, until 2010, there was a lot of energy and momentum around public interest design.
Memorializing Injustice
We believe that every scale of design offers opportunities to benefit users, makers, and the environment. Our furniture design studio, MASS.Made, extends MASS’s commitment to local fabrication by making sustainable products that benefit both people and the planet. Read more about The Embrace, designed in partnership with artist Hank Willis Thomas.
The Co-op is soliciting program ideas from its members, and construction should begin by the end of the year. Kroner helped assemble what became a coalition of 16 organizations to explore possibilities. Dutchess County provided seed funding and eventually purchased the property from the city.
Lipan Apache Cemetery project to be completed with Mellon Foundation grant – The Big Bend Sentinel - The Big Bend Sentinel
Lipan Apache Cemetery project to be completed with Mellon Foundation grant – The Big Bend Sentinel.
Posted: Wed, 11 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
I loved walking the city, giving me exposure to the cultural dynamics and urban texture of Paris and fueling my love for cities. The Gun Violence Memorial Project is currently on display at the National Building Museum, in Washington D.C. The exhibition features four houses built of 700 glass bricks, representing the average number of lives taken due to gun violence every week in America. Each brick holds a remembrance object given to the project in honor of a loved one taken by gun violence. The memorial project is an effort led by MASS in partnership with artist Hank Willis Thomas, Purpose Over Pain, and Everytown for Gun Safety to honor victims of the gun violence epidemic.
Team
By investing in local construction capacity MASS.Build assists our partners in delivering projects that maximize value throughout the supply chain. Everyone involved in the project recognized Thomas’s design as a risky, provocative choice—including the sculptor himself. “I remember showing Michael (Murphy) the rendering and saying, ‘I don’t know if I can do this without the heads,’” Thomas said at a forum before the memorial’s unveiling. “We wanted to force people to snap out of the matrix and realize there is something bigger at play.” Their joint submission won a design competition, and Evans led a team of 20 at MASS Design who saw the project through. Our projects move beyond just issues of energy use and efficiency, to holistically design the project ecosystem, including an entire supply chain that is sustainable, resilient, and regenerative. We work using a One Health design strategy that produces diverse, healthy, and productive habitats for human, animal, and ecological growth.
Rose Fellows are designers, architects and artists dedicated to social justice who work in partnership with local, community based nonprofits to bring their design and planning skills to the benefit of the community. The fellows work on affordable housing and community facilities, community planning processes, open space and recreation, transportation and economic development issues. They are designers, translators, instigators, supporters, cheerleaders and spokespersons. They bring hard work and good humor, passion and energy to their work and learn as much from the community, and from each other, as they contribute. The fellowship is sponsored by Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit that invested over $43.6 billion in community development.
Community development corporations are among the place-based organizations who advocate for the well-being of their neighbors and translate their love and concern into dignified, secure, healthful housing in their communities. To make housing home, we need to agree on a vision of a country where every person has a home, and that starts by knowing your neighbor. More inclusive, equitable futures are grounded in how we design for justice and the human condition. Katie Swenson is a Senior Principal of international non-profit MASS Design Group, and she has spent her career building social equity and advocating environmental sustainability. At the heart of her work is a thread of collective optimism, a knack for bringing people together to create healthier communities that promote human dignity and joy.
Though MASS’s office, on Chandler Street, is a half-mile from “The Embrace,” the vast majority of the firm’s work over the past decade-plus has been half a world away. Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users. MASS Design Group shared our innovative practice model and design methodology at The Architectural League of New York in the Current Work Series. The MASS-curated exhibition AFRITECT opened at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Find us in The Laboratory of the Future’s Force Majeure, Giardini, Central Pavilion May 20 - November 26, 2023.
MASS Design won a competition for the project and the county committed $25 million to build it, to be supplemented by private fundraising. MASS Design’s plan includes a pool, basketball court, fitness center, childcare center, intergenerational playscape, and space for enrichment classes—all set in an inviting open design. Ahead comes the challenge of aligning those features with a final budget. Their approach largely relies on collaboration with nonprofits and local government. Long focused on land conservation along the Hudson, the organization decided to seek a larger role in river cities at about the time MASS Design took root in Poughkeepsie. “One thing led to another, and the relationships just started to develop,” said Jason Camporese, Scenic Hudson’s chief financial officer.
MASS Design collaborated with Thomas from the start, and Evans, who works in the firm’s Boston headquarters, served as lead architect. The collapse embodied all that befell Poughkeepsie after the federal government made a massive urban renewal investment in the 1960s. Two three-lane arterials built to speed traffic through the city rendered the downtown an island of underinvestment. Buildings were demolished to make way for private development that never came. The call Murphy fielded followed Hurricane Irene, which flooded the Fall Kill, a river channelized by the Army Corps of Engineers and choked by trash.
In an interview with ArchDaily, Katie explores her background and career, as well as what it means to design for more equitable futures today. Like architecture, construction is never neutral, it either hurts or heals. By starting MASS.Build, our own construction division in Rwanda, MASS is better able to deliver quality projects for our clients and partners while supporting the local economy with local purchasing, education, and job creation. Since its launch in 2019, MASS.Build’s construction team has grown to include 160 full-time, salaried staff (97% of whom are Rwandan, and 28% of whom are women), as well as 2,100 Rwandan contract staff. MASS.Build’s goal is to be a changemaker in the Rwandan construction sector—advancing ethics and impact, while meeting project targets. Driven by principles of design excellence, environmental stewardship, and human dignity, MASS.Build will expand our ability to deliver projects of impact from start to finish.
