COLLAGED COLLECTIONS

The design of this museum for East Boston investigates contemporary ideas about allure and collage, producing deceptions and irregularities throughout the project, thereby drawing the user in. We pose to question in this post-digital age of architecture what it means to be simultaneously both object and field. This ideological approach hopes to generate a museum that acts as an art collection in itself, a museum of differences where rooms and art,subsequently contained not-quite-rightly within begin to come together, producing a maze-like and mysteriously fascinating spatial experience. With various surprises in each room, unexpected details, and controlled views, these collections are then resolved by the nominal exterior forms that pile together on the site to mimic and stitch themselves into the urban context. The facade then works to disillusion and tricks the eye with its repetition of parametric vertical wooden louvers, the system’s ability to shear and distort softens the edges and surfaces of the bars, thereby making them flicker between field and object in elevation, as much architect Paul Rudolph exhibited with his examples of textural, almost textile-like concrete finishes. We then challenged ourselves with the use of line and texture in the design of the facade system on the interior. Material choices augment the typical, and unique wall construction techniques challenge the everyday.