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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.
Seeking Abundance: MASS at The Architectural League of New York
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.
New Kennedy School Dean Announced
Chris Kroner and several others were working in the two-story MASS Design office in Poughkeepsie one night in 2018 when the seven-story building next door fell on top of them. That someone was Sierra Bainbridge, a landscape architect who had come to the GSD to teach a class. While overseeing construction of New York City’s High Line park, she began moonlighting on the Butaro project. In July 2009, two weeks after finishing the first phase of the High Line, Bainbridge flew to Rwanda, where she became—architecturally speaking—the professional in the room.
Murder in Boston
The walls are faced with volcanic field stones so common they are a nuisance for farmers, fashioned by local craftspeople into fits so precise it’s difficult to slip a sheet of paper between pieces. High-volume, low-speed fans encourage the outside air to flow in, up, and out of the buildings, providing natural ventilation. Patient beds are placed in the center of the wards, each looking out through a large window toward green hills and valleys. Brown is one of three principals who lead the Poughkeepsie office of the MASS Design Group, a mission-driven nonprofit architecture firm whose founders came together as students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) 15 years ago. Brown sees the cistern as a unique arts and events attraction in the making, one key among many to unlocking the potential of a city battered by urban renewal a half-century ago and left to live with its injuries since.
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.
Building a Better World - Harvard Magazine
Building a Better World.
Posted: Wed, 30 Aug 2023 02:48:57 GMT [source]
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.
MASS Design’s healing architecture
As the firm grew, Murphy became executive director and Ricks chief operating officer, while Saladik led healthcare work and Bainbridge the landscape studio. Shioiri-Clark and Ly went on to found their own practices, as did another early contributor, Ryan Leidner, M.Arch. Over time, more classmates joined, as did architects with other backgrounds who now play leadership roles.
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.
That identity is reflected in a new leadership team of three co-executive directors. Christian Benimana, a Rwandan architect, is responsible for the African portfolio of work, Ricks for departments that run across the organization, and Patricia Gruits for the U.S. studios. But Rwanda is where MASS was born, in 2008, and the exhibition is a brisk, readable overview of the evolution of the firm’s mission. Paul Farmer, a co-founder of Partners In Health, the Boston-based nonprofit with a global mission to improve health care access for people living in poverty, issued the challenge that became its catalyst.
A collective of architects, designers, artists, and engineers, MASS Design Group works from the understanding that architecture can heal. Our mission is to research, build, and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity. In areas of health, education, housing, conservation, culture and memory, we leverage mission-driven design processes to create impactful projects that respond to community needs. To date we have 30 projects built or under construction across the globe, including the Butaro Medical Campus in Burera District, Rwanda, the GHESKIO Cholera Treatment Center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and a Maternity Waiting Village in Kasungu, Malawi. In addition to the significant project work, MASS also has created a Labs initiative to be able invest in researching critical questions and developing and sharing a point of view in critical topic areas.
Though he served as lead architect on The Embrace memorial, Jonathan Evans joined the firm to lead its affordable-housing work. Domestically, the challenge is not building anew but rebuilding, and doing so through a web of regulation, contractors, and subcontractors. Still, he said, housing is alive with potential to address such issues as health, loneliness, and belonging. It looks nothing like an institutional American equivalent, beginning with its landscaped campus of low buildings arranged on a hilltop around an old umuvumu tree, thought to have marked the spot where the local king once engaged with his people.
