Table Of Content

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.
The Evolution of Human Fathers
Homelessness has surged in the United States, with devastating effects on the public health system. Buried beneath the ground at the highest point in Poughkeepsie, New York, sits a 36,000-square-foot concrete cistern built in 1923 to hold the city’s water supply. Replaced in 2017 after it sprang a leak, drained and fenced off from passersby, the cistern no longer serves its purpose. Its unadorned, uninviting corner entrance juts from the ground, and its doors are locked. But inside, with its vaulted ceiling supported by slender concrete columns, it is a windowless cathedral.
Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture
A mural in the Point neighborhood of Salem, Mass., reads, “Knowing your neighbor will transform love into power.” Why does love matter in cities? Love is what makes us commit to solving hard problems, to shelter and protect each other. I joined the Rose Fellowship as a fellow in 2001 in Charlottesville, Va., In 2006, I became the director of the program, until I made the transition to MASS Design Group in 2020. The program has become more comprehensive and supportive for fellows and communities, and more diverse in its personal composition, programmatic goals, and project types. It is now thriving under the leadership of Mark Matel, a Rose fellow alum, and supported by a robust National Design Initiatives team at Enterprise.
STAT: The Readout Loud

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.
BIG and A+ Architects Reveal Design for Mass Timber Transport Hub in France - ArchDaily
BIG and A+ Architects Reveal Design for Mass Timber Transport Hub in France.
Posted: Mon, 25 Mar 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
JUSTICE IS BEAUTY
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.
Our mission is to research, build, and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity.
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.
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.
National Building Museum Presents Justice is Beauty: The Work of MASS Design Group
The names of 65 Boston civil rights leaders are engraved in the tiles, and a quote from Coretta Scott King about love as a call to action is featured on the low wall around the plaza. MASS Design Group is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, governed by a board of directors who supervise the activities of the organization. Together, The Embrace and The 1965 Freedom Plaza create a memorial which marks the first step in a transformative vision for the city of Boston.
The Embrace Opens on the Boston Common
MASS Design’s focus was the setting and the larger story the memorial could tell. The circular plaza on which The Embrace sits is made of 1,300 diamond-shaped stone tiles with contrasting finishes. From above, it evokes an African American quilt and the shared “garment of destiny” of which King famously wrote.

The labs focus on food, sustainable Native communities, fringe cities, and restorative justice. With recent support from the Mellon Foundation, we started a “Public Memory and Memorial Lab” to advance research and work with thought leaders who are seeking to imagine, design, and build new monument projects across the nation. Worldwide, memory and history in built form—memorials, monuments, museums, street names, plaques, historic preservation markers—carry a responsibility to communicate complex histories and provide spaces for healing. Public memory and monuments, in their constancy and variety, encourage us to explore our individual humanity in connection to our society as a whole. We will provide direct support to organizations on projects that engage memorialization, collective memory, and truth-telling.
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.