_edited.png)
Grid and Boxes
Course
GSD Core 2 Studio
Date
2018 Spring
Instructor
Sean Canty
Site
Cambridge, MA, US
This is a club for mural artists in Boston. What’s special about this mural club is that through three nested volumes, the building offers its occupants large surfaces that simulate the scale of urban Canvas’s in the immediate area. My initial look at the composition of the city focused largely on documenting a variety of blank facades exposed within and around the site and how such blankness could offer an artistic experience at the scale of the urban block. The three painting rooms are the void spaces within the building, which meet with each other. These painting rooms form a continuous painting experience. Painters and visitors could access these rooms through a series of catwalks and stairs that offer a continuous sequence between painting studios and social functions. For the artist, they could start with their training in the interior of the mural club. After they are confident with their work, they can move up to the city canvas.
To avoid the psychological problem of people working in an annex, it was determined that the addition should have a center of its own; and that center became an enclosed garden, around which the open-workstation office space is arranged. The resulting garden, which is sixty feet wide, slopes down one level from the main entry to connect to the cafeteria at the lower level and serves as a relief space for the transition between work and meal. The rocks that form the surface of the garden came from Iron Mountain in Michigan and are appropriate to the environment created by the exposed, weathered steel building. The barn-like, skylighted roof of the central courtyard helps to give the illusion of greater height and more volume.
Contents