Plans for restorative New Lots Library are unveiled in Brooklyn

2024-12-09T14:00:00-05:00

MASS Design and the New York-based Marble Fairbanks Architects are behind a new library project in Brooklyn that combines restorative justice with the needs of the community into one dynamic 25,000-square-foot design.

The forthcoming New Lots Library will be realized on a site historically recognized as a burial ground for former slaves and freedpersons dating to the Revolutionary War era, simultaneously acknowledging their experiences and the fact that slavery as an institution was legal in New York until two decades into the 19th century.

Image credit: MASS Design Group and Marble Fairbanks Architects

Through an extensive community feedback process, both firms have envisioned a library whose activity is centered around a unifying 'Palaver' inspired by traditional African spaces used for collective community gatherings and defined by 'branch-like' radial beams extending outward to cover the reading areas and collection rooms.

Image credit: MASS Design Group and Marble Fairbanks Ar...

Deanna Van Buren on designing beyond incarceration

2020-03-10T18:58:00-04:00

Van Buren’s most ambitious undertaking so far is the reimagining of a hulking 471,000 square foot Detention Center in downtown Atlanta. [...] Van Buren has been working with social justice organizations and a mayoral task force to transform the site into an “Equity Center” that will incorporate financial literacy, job training, access to legal services and other community needs.

Writing in The New York Times, journalist Patricia Leigh Brown profiles Deanna Van Buren, co-founder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), an Oakland, California-based architecture and real estate development non-profit that is working to end mass incarceration.

Archinect profiled the work and practice of DJDS in a Studio Snapshot last year. In that interview, Van Buren explained the nature of her practice: "Our office is rooted in creative strategies that are empathic and always include deep listening to those most impacted by the problems we are seeking to solve. We are in service to those who have had no voice in the built environment. We are a relatively new practice so the thesis hasn’t changed much, but has certainly become more refined."

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Plans for restorative New Lots Library are unveiled in Brooklyn

Deanna Van Buren on designing beyond incarceration