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Design Biennial Boston is a nationally recognized program that provides a public platform for New England’s early-career, independent professional design talent. This year’s jury selected four teams whose work provides evidence of the region’s vibrancy. The installations build on the Greenway’s Playful Perspectives theme, with studies on axonometric distortion, geometric deviations, environmental geographies, and material flows.

Another Axon, Jennifer Bonner/MALL

Another Axon uses the conventions of an architectural axonometric drawing to make three-dimensional space with an ideal view of the installation seen from the top level of the adjacent parking garage. Another Axon is composed of minimal art objects and a stand of twelve trees, all of which rely on contemporary reproduction strategies. The art sculptures are lifted from an open source 3D warehouse and range from Donald Judd’s Untitled, 1961 to Carl Andre’s Slope, 1968 while the artificial trees are constructed by carefully tracing other tree drawings from a landscape catalogue.

The selection of materials for Another Axon reinforces the constructed axon view but also places emphasis on the ordinary. Two traditional exterior building materials used ubiquitously across the United States—vinyl siding and EIFS (a synthetic stucco)—are playfully distorted through orientation and color.

Firm Biography Jennifer Bonner is the director of MALL (established 2009), which stands for Mass Architectural Loopty Loops or Maximum Arches with Limited Liability—an acronym with built-in flexibility. With interest in defining “ordinary architecture,” the firm’s work engages the conventional by amplifying color, challenges traditional materials, and playfully reimagines architecture in the field. jenniferbonner.com

Project Team Jennifer Bonner, Daniela Leon, Dohyun Lee, Siobhan Feehan Miller, Jin Jin Chiu, Christian Gonzales, Youngjin Song, Estelle Yoom, Evan Farley, Aaron Hill, Brad Silling, Carlo Urmy, Bryan Ortega-Welch, Jan Kwan, Justin Jiang Structural Engineer Evan Hankin Contractors Roberto Marini, Evergreen Group Company, Inc. and IntelliTurf of New England Special Thanks Bryce Ferber, Burton LeGeyt, Rachel Vroman, Patricia Roberts, Kevin Cahill, Susan Spaulding, K. Michael Hays and Mohsen Mostafavi

Materials Vinyl siding, EPS foam, synthetic stucco, wood posts, aluminum, synthetic turf, paint, and pigment dye

Academic Affiliations Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Sponsors Harvard GSD, American Earth Anchors Inc., Home Depot Watertown Store, National Lumber, Heritage Wholesalers, Simpson Strong-Tie

Primitive, ULTRAMODERNE Most architecture is made out of planes. Plywood, sheetrock, glass. This one is different. It’s a solid made out of lines. It races from the first dimension to the third without stopping to catch its breath. An array of triangular columns form a square plan with a circular void cut out—an architectural primitive in every sense of the word.

The devil is in the details. The grid appears normal, but falls in a diagonal pattern that creates a dialogue between triangle and square. The circular void forces slight deviations in the pattern; the square talks to the circle. This geometric game of telephone is played out with knotty cedar posts and an aluminum mesh veil. The experience is that of an abstract, translucent orchard surrounding a clearing where people can gather.

Firm Biography Ultramoderne (established 2014) is a Providence-based architecture and design firm led by Aaron Forrest and Yasmin Vobis. The office creates architecture and public spaces that are at once modern, playful, and generous, with an experimental approach that leads to conceptually rigorous and well-executed designs. ultramoderne.net

Project Team Aaron Forrest, Yasmin Vobis, David Amdie, Po Ming Chou, Karin Hostettler, Wilfred Rodriguez, Nil Shu Shang, Alice Zhen Engineering Brett Schneider

Materials Cedar, aluminum insect screen

Academic Affiliations RISD (Aaron Forrest), Cooper Union (Yasmin Vobis)

Blue Marble Circus, DESIGN EARTH Blue Marble Circus is a monument to industrial humanity’s plastic footprint, which—although at a planetary scale—remains outside our geographical imagination. The installation appropriates Rome’s ancient Pantheon, known for its spherical “architecture of the cosmos,” to take aim at the dissonance between our individual worries and the vast environmental transformations the Earth is undergoing.

The geodesic sphere echoes “Blue Marble,” the iconic symbol of the environmental movement. All white inside, its plastic material expression invites another imagination now that greenhouse gases and greenhouse agriculture are at the forefront of planetary issues. The blue shrink-wrapped globe is also a camera obscura, an optical device that projects site-specific views of the surroundings into the chamber. The greenhouse miniature of the world is hence an architectural invitation to re-learn, like Atlas, how to carry the world—and all there is above it—on our shoulders.

Firm Biography Design Earth (established 2010) is a design and research practice led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy. The office examines and speculates on the geographies of technological systems, such as those of energy, trash, and water. Their publications include the recent book Geographies of Trash. design-earth.org

Project Team Design Earth Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy Conceptual Design Aaron Weller, Larisa Ovalles Fabrication Justin Lavallee, Christopher Dewart, Cristina Clow, Lex Agnew, Rawan Al-Saffar, Ching Ying Ngan, Marc Smith, Sabrina Madera, Michael Epstein, Paul Short, Jongbang Park, Xin Wen Structural Engineer Paul Kassabian, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Optics Consultant Lee Zamir, Tom Gearty Autodesk BUILD Space Athena Moore, Taylor Tobin, Adam Allard MIT Facilities and Support Jim Harrington, Jennifer O’Brien, Seth Avecilla, Maria Moran

Materials Plywood, white foam, blue shrink wrap

Academic Affiliations MIT School of Architecture and Planning

Sponsors MIT School of Architecture and Planning Dean’s Office, MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology Fay Chandler Faculty Creativity Seed Fund

Ways of Wood, MARGEN-LAB Resembling images of logs floated from forests to sawmills, Ways of Wood aims to create a link with North American landscapes of industrial extraction. The nine logs gradually transform across their length into contemporary interpretations of these raw natural materials, here shaped via computer numerical control (CNC) milling. Ways of Wood explicitly visualizes the connection between contemporary design concerns and the history of material sourcing. Counteracting the assumption that wood is a generic and uniform material, the installation brings together diverse regional species, supporting their specific characteristics and collective ecological diversity.

Wood is one of many material flows necessary to sustain urban life. Typically black-boxed and commodified, the material is often detached from any connection to the landscapes, processes, and people fundamental to its genesis. Ways of Wood uses locally sourced wood to create a public space for sitting or socializing, one that reassembles the flows between landscapes of extraction and the experience of the city today, between vernacular material sources and advanced digital design.

Biography Margen-Lab (established in 2003) is a practice directed by Daniel Ibañez that explores new territories for architecture, urbanism, and design. The firm’s work uses digital fabrication technologies to produce non-standard forms of pre-fabrication, integrates environmental and thermodynamic conditions into design, and examines territorial interdependencies in relation to material culture. margen-lab.com

Project Team Daniel Ibañez with Michael Piscitello, James Negri, and Brian Sandford

Materials Wood (eastern white pine, ash, red oak, black birch)

Academic Affiliations Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Sponsors reThink Wood, Autodesk BUILD Space, Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation

DESIGN BIENNIAL BOSTON SELECTS FOUR EMERGING DESIGNERS TO CREATE INSTALLATIONS ON THE ROSE KENNEDY GREENWAY FOR SUMMER 2017

BOSTON - Friday, March 17, 2017 - Mayor Martin J. Walsh today announces four winners of the fifth Design Biennial Boston, a nationally recognized program that provides a public platform for New England’s early-career, independent professional design talent.

Conceived and curated by over,under/pinkcomma gallery, the event is sponsored by the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and the Boston Art Commission in collaboration with Autodesk BUILD Space, the Boston Society of Architects/AIA (BSA), the BSA Foundation, and the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy.

Following an open call for entries which included submissions from each of New England’s states—Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut—the jury selected four firms whose work provides ample evidence of the region’s vibrant pool of designers. The four selected teams will be awarded $10,000 each to construct site-specific installations on the Rose Kennedy Greenway and will have access to advanced fabrication equipment provided by Autodesk BUILD Space.

The 2017 Design Biennial Boston will feature: Jennifer Bonner of MALL Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy of DESIGN EARTH Daniel Ibañez of Margen-Lab Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest of ULTRAMODERNE

Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis of Plan B Architecture & Urbanism and Benjamin Uyeda of Lowest Common Design and Zero Energy Design receive honorable mention awards this year for their submissions.

The public installations will be on view on the Rose Kennedy Greenway from August 10 through October 8.

“Boston is known as a municipal arts leader in part because we value public art and recognize the vitality it brings to a community,” says Mayor Walsh. “I congratulate the four teams selected for Design Biennial Boston 2017 who will each take design innovation to a whole new level at the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and look forward to showcasing the incredible creativity that exists in our country.”

"This fifth installment of the Design Biennial Boston brings a mix of new voices to The Greenway, reflecting diverse backgrounds, a merging of academic and professional interests, and a remarkably broad set of design aspirations,” explains Chris Grimley of over,under/pinkcomma gallery, one of the exhibition's curators. “The Design Biennial Boston offers a platform for New England’s new design talent, but it also reminds us of how we should draw more often on such innovative thinkers to respond to the challenges all communities will face in the future.”

The winning designers’ projects range from critical assessments to constructed interventions and demonstrate a breadth of influence beyond New England, including an exploration on ordinary roof typologies in Atlanta, exhibitions on the geographies of trash and oil in Ann Arbor and Venice, a digitally fabricated solar house in Madrid, and a pavilion defined by a long-span timber roof in Chicago.

“The Design Biennial Boston attracts the most forward-thinking designers, and we are looking forward to providing the winning teams with access to our R&D workshop," explains sponsor Rick Rundell of Autodesk BUILD Space. “By connecting these emerging innovators to advanced technologies for large-scale digital fabrication, they get to realize their design vision, and we get to better understand the future of making for the building industry."

"We are excited once again to host the Design Biennial Boston on The Greenway,” says Lucas Cowan, curator of public art for The Greenway Conservancy. “The 2017 season on The Greenway will be home to a wonderful confluence of architecture and public art this summer, showcasing a diversity of innovative thinkers and makers.”

“As someone who walks along the Greenway every day and enjoys its public art, I especially look forward to the Design Biennial Boston,” comments juror Josiah Stevenson, 2017 president of the BSA. “As a nation we benefit from the creativity of these emerging designers and our interaction with them.”

The jury for the 2017 Design Biennial Boston included Dina Deitsch (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts), Shauna Gillies-Smith (Ground), Mark Lamster (Dallas Morning News), Keith Krumwiede (NJIT) along with sponsors Rick Rundell (Autodesk BUILD Space), Karin Goodfellow (Boston Art Commission), Josiah Stevenson (Boston Society of Architects), Michael Evans (Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics), and Lucas Cowan (Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy). The installations and related exhibition will be curated by Chris Grimley, Michael Kubo, and Mark Pasnik (over,under/pinkcomma gallery).

Note: Headshots of winners are available upon request. Contact Chris Grimley, curator, at [email protected].

Additional support for Design Biennial Boston is provided by Millennium Partners, Boston.

JURY COMMENTS

Jennifer Bonner of MALL “What was especially appealing about this submission was that it combined a bold and original graphic and architectural aesthetic with a legible, provocative social agenda.” —Mark Lamster

Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy of DESIGN EARTH “The powerful drawings and installations of these exceptional designers make visible—in a profound and terrifyingly beautiful way—the deep and damaging impact that human activity has had on the earth and the consequences of that impact for our continued inhabitation of the planet.” —Keith Krumweide

Daniel Ibañez of Margen-Lab “We were struck by the exuberant manifestations of architectural ideas through form, materials, and fabrication strategies. Tangible and energetic, the prototype pavilions in this submission create architecture that beckons to be engaged with.” —Shauna Gillies-Smith

Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest of ULTRAMODERNE “The team’s portfolio consistently exhibited a thoughtful and generous approach to design by which iconic forms, contemporary engineering, and direct materiality merged into elegant and witty spaces. Their work presents open and distinctive areas for gatherings and offers up a striking model of civic design for our times.” —Dina Deitsch

#designbiennialboston #boston #biennial #design #Architecture #bsaspace #rosekennedygreenway #bosart #Autodesk #Pinkcomma

Design Biennial Boston releases 2017 Call for Entries

Emerging practices and their designers are invited to submit work for the fifth Design Biennial Boston. The program showcases the most significant design leaders among New England’s early-career, independent professional talent through a juried exhibition, publication, and site-specific public installation on Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway.

Up to four winners and one runner-up will be selected for 2017, based on a review of portfolios of prior work. Each winner will create an installation with a budget of up to $10,000 and gain access to the Autodesk BUILD Space in Boston’s Innovation and Design Building.

For details, download the complete Call for Entries.

Submissions are due January 25, 2017.

#DesignBiennialboston #Boston #Architecture #biennial #autodesk #‎BosArt‬#bsaspace #pinkcomma #bostonsocietyofarchitects #BSAFoundation

Design Biennial Boston 2015

2017 Design Biennial Boston Jurors and Past Participants

The 2017 Design Biennial Boston jury will include: Dina Deitsch (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts), Shauna Gillies-Smith (Ground), Mark Lamster (Dallas Morning News/Loeb Fellow), Keith Krumwiede (NJIT). These jurors will be joined by members from the sponsoring organizations: Rick Rundell (Autodesk BUILD Space), Karin Goodfellow (Boston Art Commission), Michael Evans (Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics), Josiah Stevenson (Boston Society of Architects), and Lucas Cowan (Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy). The exhibition and event will be curated by Chris Grimley, Michael Kubo, and Mark Pasnik (directors, pinkcomma gallery).

Past Participants: The following twenty-three firms and individuals have participated in the Design Biennial Boston program: Ground, Höweler + Yoon Architecture, LinOldhamOffice, Merge Architects, MOS, over,under, SSD, Studio Luz, Uni, Utile (2008); C&MP, Dan Hisel Architect, Schneider Studio, Touloukian Touloukian, William O’Brien Jr. (2010); GroundView, Kiel Moe, Matter Design, Project_ (2012/2013); Cristina Parreño Architecture, GLD, Landing Studio, Mass Design Group (2015).

2015 DESIGN BIENNIAL BOSTON

The 2015 Biennial recognizes four design firms, who have created installations on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Browse an introductory display at BSA Space (290 Congress Street) then tour the installations: three located on the block between Congress and Pearl Streets, and a fourth near High Street. Details on each are provided below.

CURATORS’ STATEMENT

Among the essential evidence for any city’s evolving role as a center of creativity is the fostering of its emerging voices in the formation of new ideas, talents, and products. Greater Boston’s wealth of academic and professional institutions make it an engine for design innovation, but its strongest influence has often been in other locations. It is a center for voices heard nationally and internationally, yet it sometimes lacks the means for that impact to be felt locally.

Now in its fourth cycle, the Design Biennial Boston is a platform for such voices that allows them to test their ideas in various public venues. This year the Biennial goes outdoors, with four installations on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Each establishes a mode of public engagement between those walking the Greenway and the installations themselves—seen in pixelated glass reflections, through interactive fiberglass chambers, across fields of reconstituted wharf pilings, or within a lattice-like room. They evoke varied sensations and memories: a lighthouse, a grove of trees, a wooden pier, a woven fence.

If these projects collectively gauge anything about the future of design ideas in Boston and beyond, they share a deep fascination with production processes—from material exploration to techniques of fabrication—as well as a parallel engagement with the public in public space. The installations all take seriously architecture’s theoretical aspirations at the same time that they channel those interests into structures that embrace civic life and personal experience—shaping views of the city or enriching experiences for individuals.

At a time when Mayor Martin Walsh has brought forth urgent questions about the quality of buildings being produced in the city, each firm’s larger body of work demonstrates how Boston’s rising design talents can be drawn on for their innovative thinking, explorative architectural ideas, and ability to respond to the challenges we will face in the future. As opposed to typical architectural exhibitions, visitors are invited to go outside and browse the most recent of these works in person. Get close, look through, walk around, peek inside.

—Chris Grimley, Michael Kubo, Mark Pasnik, over,under

Special thanks to the participants, jurors, and Lucas Cowan, Laura Jasinski, Mary Fichtner, Karin Goodfellow, Michael Evans, Brett Pierson, Ryan Pinkham, and Andrew Potter.

#designbiennialboston

Marginal Landing Studio

Marginal wharfs are characteristic features of New England, although many are in decay today. Remaining from earlier industrial and shipping eras, they have now become markers of the interface between ground and sea, a dynamic landscape of tidal movement, ecological diversity, and contestation between the interests of expanding human development and the imminent threat of rising sea levels. Marginal is a field created out of eight recycled oak pilings from a shipyard in Boston Harbor that have been sliced into more than one thousand cross sections by chainsaw. Each two-inch-thick piece was sorted into one of three types: rounds (with a roughly circular shape), chewies (where portions of the pilings were eaten away by marine borers), and oblongs (where a branch once grew from the original tree). These were stacked on one another to reconstitute eighteen new figures in a grid. Marginal measures change in the site’s natural slope toward the harbor and brings subtle awareness to our movement across it.

Tectonics of Transparency: The Tower Cristina Parreño Architecture

Glass has traditionally been used as an infill material, one that is rarely understood for its structural possibilities. This tower is part of an ongoing series of projects (including a wall and a shelter) that examine the innate capacity of glass to withstand extraordinary compressive forces. Each of the 350 blocks in this seventeen-foot-tall landmark is custom fabricated from layers of glass and assembled in a screen-like pattern of alternating blocks and openings. The piece invokes the Greenway’s infrastructural and maritime heritage. Working as a periscope, it recuperates the views from the elevated highway that only two decades ago rumbled overhead. From the more distant past, it recalls a lighthouse guarding the harbor before the city extended its landform into the water.

Grove GLD

A surprising interior spatial experience is at the heart of this installation, created from a series of chambers for collective interaction. By peeking inside visitors not only see the voids that were formed around inflated molds, but might also catch glimpses of others doing the same. Such chance encounters are common to urban life, but here they are exaggerated, reframed, and celebrated as a moment of both estrangement and connection. From the outside, Grove evokes a clustering of trees, formally reconceived as a series of composite surfaces made of resin-infused fiberglass. But inside, it dislocates—visually, acoustically, and spatially—creating a strangely intimate new enclosure in an open public landscape.

Lo-Fab MASS Design Group

Located adjacent to the spiraling ramps of the Central Artery, this lattice-like structure shelters a pair of curved paths that lead to a contained, personalized space open to the sky and screened from the city. The structure’s custom metal joints connect to machined lumber pieces to create an elliptical geometry that vaults over the paths. The lattice—in which pieces are unique to their position in the vault—was produced using high-tech software and fabrication techniques, but the thousand-plus components were then assembled in a locally fabricated, participatory manner by volunteers. The formation of an intimate space for only a few occupants at any one time identifies this spot on the Greenway as a contemplative retreat in the midst of the whirling activity of people and vehicles.

The Fourth Design Biennial Boston Opens!

THE 2015 BIENNIAL OPENS WITH FOUR ARCHITECTURAL INSTALLATIONS ON THE ROSE KENNEDY GREENWAY AND A DISPLAY AT BSA SPACE.

BOSTON - July 16, 2015 - Today Mayor Martin J. Walsh announced the opening of the fourth Design Biennial Boston, a program that foregrounds emerging architects, landscape architects, and designers who have created inspiring and innovative practices in Massachusetts. Following an open call for entries, four firms—Cristina Parreño Architecture, GLD, Landing Studio, and MASS Design Group—were selected in March by a jury of distinguished professionals and academics. In the months since, the firms have been preparing installations that are on view on the Rose Kennedy Greenway through September 25. They join nineteen previous winners of the Biennial, a group that represents Boston’s deeply creative pool of design talent.

The 2015 Biennial is sponsored by the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, the Boston Art Commission, pinkcomma gallery, BSA Space, and the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy. A related introductory exhibition curated by pinkcomma is located at BSA Space (290 Congress Street).

The four site-specific installations include a seventeen-foot-high landmark that performs as an urban periscope constructed of 350 custom-fabricated glass blocks, a series of chambers enclosed by resin-infused fiberglass that forms a surprising collective interior space, a field of eighteen reconstituted wharf pilings recycled from a shipyard in Boston Harbor, and a lattice-like structure composed of more than one thousand wood and metal components to create an intimate gathering space.

“Boston has such a vibrant talent pool of designers, and these four installations remind us of how creative those designers can be when given opportunities," said Mayor Walsh. "I want Boston to be a municipal arts leader, and putting this type of exciting and thoughtful work into the public realm is what gets us closer to that goal.”

”Boston is home to a healthy, vibrant design community,” remarked Joyce Linehan, Chief of Policy at the City of Boston. “We have world-renowned architects, artists, and innovators. We have outstanding schools that specialize in design. We have all the tools we need to meet the Mayor’s challenge to think big about our built environment as we embark on our first citywide plan in fifty years. The emerging designers represented here exemplify the spirit of imagination that will inform our process."

"This fourth installment of the Biennial has moved outdoors to put the work of emerging designers on display in an exciting and very public way,” explained Chris Grimley of pinkcomma and over,under, one of the exhibition's curators. “At a time when the mayor has brought forth urgent questions about the quality of buildings being produced in the city, the Biennial participants demonstrate how Boston’s new design talent can be drawn on for its innovative thinking and ability to respond to the challenges we will face in the future.”

The previous design work of each team is presented at BSA Space as are the ideas behind their installations. The public is invited to tour the exhibition and then wander through the Greenway, where they will find four installations meant to spark their imaginations by defining spaces, shaping views, and evoking meanings related to the site’s past. The works are located on two blocks along Atlantic Avenue, the first with three installations between Congress and Pearl Streets, the second with one installation nearest to High Street. The sites are immediately adjacent to the 250-foot-high suspended art piece, As If It Were Already Here, by Janet Echelman.

“We are excited to host the 2015 Biennial on the Greenway,” said Lucas Cowan, curator of public art for the Greenway Conservancy. “With the Biennial installations and Janet Echelman’s piece so close to one another, the Greenway has become home to a wonderful confluence of architecture and public art, showcasing innovative thinkers who make Greater Boston their home.”

“This year’s Design Biennial Boston has provided four outstanding emerging designers with an invaluable chance to engage the wider public in their imaginative work," commented juror Tim Love AIA, 2015 president of the BSA and a Biennial participant in 2008. “BSA Space is pleased to host the introductory exhibition and support the Biennial. We believe that Boston’s future is in good hands if these brilliant minds are given more opportunities to shape our city."

The jury for the 2015 Biennial included curators Chris Grimley, Michael Kubo, and Mark Pasnik AIA (pinkcomma gallery) along with Lucas Cowan (Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy), Eden Dutcher (GroundView), Michael Evans (Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics), Mary Fichtner (BSA Space), Karin Goodfellow (Boston Art Commission), Dan Hisel (Dan Hisel Architect/Wentworth Institute), Eric Höweler AIA (Höweler + Yoon/Harvard University), Tim Love AIA (Utile/Northeastern University/2015 BSA President), and Ana Mijlački (Project_/MIT).

The public installations and introductory exhibition will be on view from July 16 through September 25.

#designbiennialboston #design #biennial #boston #greenway #bsaspace

The 2015 Design Biennial Boston opens on Thursday, July 16 in conjunction with the Boston Calling Block Party in Dewey Square. Music and drinks at 5:00. Biennial opening remarks by Joyce Linehan (Chief of Policy for the City of Boston) at 6:30. Then stroll the Greenway to see the installations and meet their designers.

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