Archinect - News

Four design teams shortlisted for former KKK site reclamation project in Texas

2023-10-11T17:51:00-04:00

A four-finalist shortlist for Transform 1012 N. Main Street’s adaptive reuse and racial equity project has been announced as part of a multiphase selection process that will eventually deliver the new Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing to Fort Worth, Texas.

The chance at redesigning what was once the Ku Klux Klan Klavern No. 101 Auditorium will fall on a proposal that best expresses and reflects the group’s reclamatory mission while “[prioritizing] community, equity, and collective healing in the design of the space” above all other considerations of site and material.

“The exceptional quality of the submissions prompted us to expand the initially envisioned shortlist from three to four teams and to extend our selection deadline for a few days,” Ben Crawford, the Chair of Transform 1012’s Design Architect Selection Committee, added. “We are thrilled to welcome these architects to Fort Worth to see how they could be a partner in reimagining the processes for enacting th...

Selection process detailed for historic reuse of former KKK site as a cultural arts center in Fort Worth

2023-06-29T19:56:00-04:00

Transform 1012 N. Main Street, the non-profit coalition responsible for a new reclamation project targeting a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium in Fort Worth, Texas, has just announced the next phases of the selection process for an architect who will eventually deliver The Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing in what is being pitched as an "act of reparative justice" for the community.

Eight months after the process began, work will now continue towards the ultimate goal of creating a unifying cultural hub replete with state-of-the-art performance spaces, arts educational offerings, room for social service organizations that work with LGBTQ+ youth, a maker space, and exhibition areas dedicated toward social justice programming.

The Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing Exterior. Concept rendering by MASS Design Group. Courtesy of Transform 1012 N. Main Street.

The space is named in honor of Fred Rouse, a local Black man who was lynched by a white mob in 1921, t...

MASS Design Group's touching Hank Willis Thomas MLK memorial commission debuts in Boston

2023-01-17T15:57:00-05:00

The wait for artist Hank Willis Thomas and MASS Design Group’s public memorial to Martin Luther King on the Boston Common finally ended over the weekend with a ribbon-cutting ceremony that included the sculpture's design team and a host of local political dignitaries.

They were on hand to witness the unveiling of Thomas’ monumental The Embrace sculpture that now sits at the southern edge of America’s oldest public park in the newly-created 1965 Freedom Plaza, a short distance away from the 236-year-old statehouse and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. By rights, putting the legacy of its subjects in proper place alongside the Hub’s other paragons of social justice causes from centuries past.

Image courtesy MASS Design Group

Dr. King met his wife, the late Coretta Scott King, at Boston University’s Myles Standish Hall while the two were both graduate students at different institutions in early 1952. Thomas wanted to create a lasting monumen...

MASS Design Group announces acquisition of long-time Santa Fe collaborator Atkin Olshin Schade Architects

2022-11-16T12:03:00-05:00

MASS Design Group has announced its acquisition of Santa Fe, New Mexico-based Atkin Olshin Schade Architects (AOS) in a move they say will offer an enhancement of the relationship the two have built already through years of collaboration.

The merger makes the new combined entity Santa Fe’s largest architectural office, with further opportunity to leverage AOS’s Philadelphia operation in order to pursue “innovative approaches to preservation, adaptive reuse, and design for mission-focused organizations throughout the northeast and nationally.”

Previously on Archinect: MASS Design Group founder Michael Murphy announces he is stepping down, will join the faculty at Georgia Tech

It comes just under a month after MASS’s co-founder Michael Murphy left the firm to take a position on faculty at Georgia Tech University, handing over the reins to his former Senior Principal and Managing Director Christian Benimana and Patricia Gruits as well as the firm’s co-founder and current Chief Design O...

MASS Design founder Michael Murphy announces he is stepping down, will join the faculty at Georgia Tech

2022-10-10T11:30:00-04:00

MASS Design Group President and co-founder Michael Murphy has announced he will be stepping down from his post after 15 years to pursue new academic and professional initiatives in a move announced on Friday.

The announcement stated that MASS will continue under the leadership of Senior Principals and Managing Directors Christian Benimana and Patricia Gruits and Founding Principal and Chief Design Officer Alan Ricks. Murphy will now join the faculty at Georgia Tech as its new Thomas W. Ventulett III Distinguished Chair.

The recent AIA Firm Award winners have become recognized throughout the design community for their commitment to restorative social justice projects and three core guiding principles of beauty, dignity, and the increased flow of natural air best exemplified in their designs for the Butaro District Hospital and subsequent commissions across Rwanda and the United States.

Previously on Archinect: new documentary tells the story behind MASS Design Group's cholera clinic ...

'Beauty matters': MASS Design Group featured on 60 Minutes

2022-09-07T13:13:00-04:00

Lesley Stahl: Do you think that COVID will change architecture for everybody? Michael Murphy: Everyone around the world is going through a shift in their understanding of the buildings around us. That they may make us sicker, that they could make us healthier if they were better designed.

MASS founding principal and executive director Michael Murphy discussed the curative father-son restoration project that led to his enrollment at Harvard and subsequent experience with the firm’s award-winning early Butaro District Hospital project in Rwanda, which helped cement the place of air flow as one of its three simple design mandates long before the impacts of COVID-19 were noted across the industry.

Murphy's desire to give back to his hometown of Poughkeepsie through various retrofit projects is also highlighted along with a site visit to the in-progress Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture campus, which comes well-appointed with furnishings created by Managing Director Christian Benimana's MASS.Made studio in Kigali. “Beauty matters,” Murphy told 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl finally about the approach that led to last year's AIA Firm Award win. “Spaces...

MASS Design Group 'catalyzes conservation and species protection' with The Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

2022-06-15T13:52:00-04:00

MASS Design Group is celebrating the completion of the Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Rwanda.

Named in collaboration with comedian and television host Ellen DeGeneres, the 12-acre campus is located in the country's Musanze District and Kigali. The campus features three new facilities for education, research, and conservation. It is comprised of a selection of native landscaping and materials assembled by a team of over 2,400 local workers in a demonstration of the studio’s “Purpose Built” process developed by Principal Patricia Gruits and overseen by its new construction arm MASS.Build

"The campus will do more than inspire a generation of conservation activists in Rwanda, it will model new ways for global conservationists to bind ecosystems and communities in support of one another." - Michael Murphy, MASS Design Group Founding Principal and Exec. Dir. Image © Iwan Baan.

MASS Design says it worked with the foundation to design everything – from furnishings ...

Former KKK auditorium to be reborn as a cultural arts center in Fort Worth

2022-05-20T15:28:00-04:00

A Texas-based, non-profit by the name of Transform 1012 N. Main Street (Transform 1012) has announced the purchase of a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium in Fort Worth, Texas. It will be converted into The Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing, a new cultural hub and space for reconciliation and reclamation for the community.

The auditorium, located at 1012 N. Main Street, originally opened in 1924, when Fort Worth had one of the largest KKK memberships in the United States. It served as the group’s headquarters in Texas and was designed to intimidate Black, Hispanic, and immigrant residents returning home from the city center.

The acquisition served as the driving force behind the formation of Transform 1012 in 2019. The non-profit is a coalition of local arts, grassroots, and service organizations as well as pro bono partners and individuals. The purchase of the building was made possible by a significant donation from the former owners and a grant from the Rainwater Char...

MASS Design's Michael Murphy says we're failing to learn the epidemic design lessons Florence Nightingale provided 150 years ago

2021-12-29T16:39:00-05:00

At our peril, we have ignored Nightingale’s prescriptions. The history of the hospital contains clear lessons about the importance of air movement through buildings, the public health risks of poor design, and the dangers of technological reliance. Architecture professionals should look back to see what else has been forgotten or ignored in the race to merge art and technology. Whose lives might be at stake if they don’t?

Murphy is a principal at Boston-based MASS Design Group and the author of The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity, which accompanies the firm’s recent exhibition Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics on view at the Cooper Hewitt until February 23rd.

In it, Murphy argues that the COVID pandemic has affected a new paradigm in the ways architects and healthcare designers think about hospitals that are reliant on air, either cooled or circulated by mechanical systems, and failed in their attempts to mitigate the virus’ spread by fenestration that is now an impediment to the application of effective inpatient treatment.

Interior of MASS Design Group's Butaro Hospital in Ruhengeri, Rwanda. Photo: Iwan Baan.

“Like all crises that reveal cracks in the system, the pandemic has prompted a public reckoning with the role of buildings in shaping our health. Recent reporting is waking up to the crisis of breathability in buildings, raising questi...

MASS Design Group wins AIA Firm Award, Gold Medal goes to Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa

2021-12-09T15:04:00-05:00

The American Institute of Architects has today announced two of its major awards, with the 2022 Gold Medal going to Brooks + Scarpa founders Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa, and the annual Firm Award being given to Boston-based MASS Design Group.

The latter was awarded for their years-long commitment to social causes which began with a 2008 project in Rwanda. Since then, the firm has grown to include more than 200 different creative staffers in addition to offshoots like MASS.Made and MASS.Build that have engendered a host of design and developmental projects in addition to superlative buildings like the traveling Gun Violence Memorial project and the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice by MASS Design Group. Image: Equal Justice Initiative.

In its announcement, the AIA commended MASS Design for “[leveraging] the lessons it learned in Rwanda to shape a framework that allows the firm to inform policy develop...

MASS Design Group, Minneapolis to be honored by UPenn's Weitzman School

2021-11-18T17:04:00-05:00

MASS Design Group will be honored alongside the city of Minneapolis by the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design in a public celebration held at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy this evening.

The Boston-based firm will receive the prestigious Kanter Tritsch Medal for its “design excellence and commitment to a climate-positive future.”

Likewise, Minneapolis is being honored with the Witte-Sakamoto Family Medal for its comprehensive 2040 resiliency plan that was developed with the help of Buro Happold.

“MASS and Minneapolis remind us of the central role for design in overcoming seemingly intractable challenges like unequal access to jobs and housing, and mass incarceration,” Weitzman dean Frederick Steiner said in a statement. “Our professions have a lot of work to do to see that entire communities aren’t left out of the design process.”

The non-profit, non-...

MASS Design Group's Jeffrey Mansfield receives $50,000 grant for study into architecture for the deaf

2020-12-02T11:04:00-05:00

This week, Mansfield, a design director for MASS Design Group, was named a Disability Futures Fellow by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He’s one of 20 artists around the country to receive the $50,000 grant, a new initiative and the only national, multidisciplinary prize for creators with disabilities.

Born deaf, Mansfield, according to The Boston Globe, "plans to use the award to further his Deaf Space Archive research into how the designs of 19th- and 20th-century schools for the deaf contributed to societal perceptions of deafness as a pathology — and what that did to deaf students. He travels the country, learning stories of deaf education."

MASS Design Group publishes COVID-19 guide for retrofitting senior housing

2020-08-06T16:07:00-04:00

Mass Design Group has published its latest COVID-19 guide aimed at retrofitting and upgrading existing senior living facilities to minimize pandemic transmission. The Designing Senior Housing for Safe Interaction; The Role of Architecture in Fighting COVID-19 guide follows a strategy document published by the group earlier this year focused on adapting existing hospital spaces to better deal with a surge of patients suffering from airborne disease.

Mass Design Group's latest guide highlights the high level of infections and deaths that have taken place within these facilities and offers a bevy of approaches for minimizing the ways in which residents are exposed to the disease.

Previously on Archinect: "MASS Design Group brings pandemic design expertise to American hospital wards." A diagram showing interventions that the Mount Sinai Hospital implemented to turn this adult ICU wing into one that could treat patients who have tested positive for coronavirus. Image courtesy MASS Desig...

Today's Virtual Events cover issues of smart cities, design education, and the architecture of healthcare

2020-05-12T08:00:00-04:00

The online events happening today, as featured in Archinect's Virtual Event Guide, all address the challenges we're currently facing and how that will impact architects working in areas of new technology, education and healthcare.

Are you hosting a virtual lecture? Presentation? Tour? Interview? Happy Hour? Submit it for consideration by clicking here.

Are you an expert in an arena that's especially important right now? Let us know if you would like to work with Archinect to host an online event.

Smart cities: Resiliency Strategies in a challenging world
Tuesday, May 12, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT
This webinar explores how smart cities and its associated innovations can be leveraged to respond to and recover from crises, including pandemics.
Click here to attend and/or register

Creating a Bright Tomorrow: Design Education for a New Sustainable World
Tuesday, May 12, 2020 | 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT
Join Cooper Hewitt for a riveting discussion with designers, educators, and students ...

MASS Design Group brings pandemic design expertise to American hospital wards

2020-04-30T16:17:00-04:00

In the mad rush to accommodate the surge of COVID-19 patients in New York City that started in March, the city's Mount Sinai hospital looked to MASS Design Group to help it understand how its built environment could be influencing contagion control, and to gather additional knowledge that could be shared with other hospitals facing a surge in COVID-19 patients .

MASS Design Group has extensive experience working within the pandemic setting, as the group's work in Haiti, East Africa, and other international locales battling infectious disease outbreaks demonstrates. In a recent article published by The Boston Globe, Michael Murphy, founding principal and executive director of MASS Design Group, outlines design approaches focused on the potential spaces have to transmit (or prevent transmission) of deadly particles via "air, surfaces, and water."

MASS Design Group partnered with Ariadne Labs, a healthcare innovation consultancy founded by Atul Gawande, to publish an online PDF title...

Early highlight contributors announced for 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial

2019-03-14T15:25:00-04:00

The curators for the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial have announced early highlight contributors who will create newly commissioned projects and other materials for the exhibition.

The initial list is comprised of 51 practices and practitioners from 19 countries. It includes architects, artists, collectives, and researchers, whose work touches on the biennial's four curatorial focus areas: land, memory, rights, and civic participation.

Among the designers tasked with exploring the theme of land is Chicago-based architect Theaster Gates, who will challenge the concept of land as property and commodity. Also participating will be Wolff Architects, a design studio in South Africa that works at the nexus of design, advocacy, research and documentation, as well as Territorial Agency, Caroline Caycedo, and Joar Nango.

The design collaborative MASS Design Group, best known for their community-driven approaches, will look at sites of memory. Other contributors whose projects will dive in...

'Design for Good' exhibition opening this weekend at the Museum of Design Atlanta

2018-09-19T16:15:00-04:00

The Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) has announced their upcoming exhibition Design for Good: Architecture for Everyone, curated by John Cary. Opening on September 23, the museum will showcase projects featured in Cary's book Design for Good.

Women’s Opportunity Center in Kasungu, Rwanda, by Sharon Davis Design and Women for Women International. Image: Elizabeth Felicella.

The exhibition highlights projects around the world that embody a sense of dignity and belonging. Emphasizing the power of design on every person's life, the show affirms good design should be for everyone, not just the elite who can afford it.

Women’s Opportunity Center in Kasungu, Rwanda, by Sharon Davis Design and Women for Women International. Image: Elizabeth Felicella.

MODA will host a lecture by curator John Cary on September 27, along with a lecture on October 18 by Michael Murphy, Executive Director of MASS Design Group.

St. Jerome’s Children’s Centre in Murunyu, Nakuru, Kenya, by Orkidstudio. Image: Odyss...

Lynching memorial heralded as greatest 21st Century American architectural achievement

2018-08-30T15:19:00-04:00

These conjoined entities are the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the latter more commonly identified as a memorial to the victims of lynching. They are both extraordinary, though it is the second that behooves a pilgrimage. To my mind, it is the single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century, and the most successful memorial design since the 1982 debut of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public this past April, is the first memorial dedicated to the victims of lynching and racial prejudice in the US. The design, a collaborative effort between MASS Design Group and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), was recently acclaimed by architecture critic Mark Lamster as "the single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century."

National Memorial for Peace and Justice by MASS Design Group, located in Montgomery, AL. Image: Equal Justice Initiative.

An investigation by the EJI documented over 4,400 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. Lamster upholds the memorial's design for its ability to convey the devastating reality of this number in a physically powerful experience.

Watch: new documentary tells the story behind MASS Design Group's cholera clinic in Haiti

2016-09-20T14:24:00-04:00

Just nine months after a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, killing hundreds of thousands of people, a cholera epidemic broke out. While it became clear shortly after that the epidemic began with U.N. peacekeepers, who had been active in Haiti since 2004 and brought the disease from Nepal, the U.N. only just recently took formal responsibility. With overwhelming rebuilding efforts and damaged infrastructure throughout the country, Haiti was made even more vulnerable, and the disease spread through consumption of tainted water and food.

To attend to the sick population, Haitian infectious disease specialist Dr. Jean-William Pape and his organization, Les Centres GHESKIO, set up and ran temporary treatment sites, but after two years, when the epidemic didn’t seem to be shrinking back, Dr. Pape realized that unsanitary waste collection practices in the treatment centers were contaminating the groundwater, reintroducing the disease into the population.

So to cut off the cycle of r...

MASS Design Group to propose "Bauhaus of Africa" at U.N. Summit

2015-09-24T18:59:00-04:00

On September 27th, the MASS Design Group will officially present their idea for a Bauhaus-type school for Sub-Saharan Africa at the United Nations Solutions Summit. The proposed program would be based in Kigali, Rwanda and would purposefully "incubate local innovation towards tackling the biggest building boom of the next quarter century" according to a press release issued by MASS.

This building boom refers to the estimated addition of one billion Africans over the next two decades, while the project's name refers to the infamous 20th century Bauhaus school, which encouraged not only theory, but actual practice, resulting in a widespread adoption of modernism. This practice element will be crucial in a nation which will require massive amounts of new (and hopefully, artfully designed) infrastructure.

Editor's Picks #400

2015-01-06T11:52:00-05:00

For the latest Student Works: Amelia featured Cellular Tessellation, a pavilion done as a "collaborative research effort among students from Bond University, University of Technology Sydney, University of South Wales, and University of Sydney" for the Sydney Vivid Light festival of 2014.

Plus, Alexander Showcase:(ed) architect Jorge Mealha’s Óbidos Technological Park Main Building, sited in the countryside north of Lisbon.

News

Paul scoured the archives and website analytics in an attempt to most accurately represent 2014, month by month, by sharing the most popular stories, job opportunities and discussions. Reflecting on digital publishing trends he noted

"As the internet continues to move discussions away from publications to social networks, Archinect's increase in volume in the forum and comments sections proves that we're continuing to provide a platform to facilitate communication across diverse social circles".

Meanwhile, Nicholas Korody put together a list of what Randy Deutsc...

MASS Design Group's new Open-Air Clinics in Haiti, reviewed by Michael Kimmelman

2014-12-29T14:10:00-05:00

The clinics here are simple, even handsome. Instead of constructing hermetic shields in the form of airtight, inflexible hospital buildings, the architects took advantage of Haiti’s Caribbean environment, exploiting island cross breezes to heal patients and aid caregivers. It’s not clear yet how well the clinics will work. [...] If they turn out right, they could serve as relatively light-footed models for other struggling countries that lack resources for high-end Western-style hospitals.

A hyper-customized cholera treatment center in Port Au Prince

2013-12-23T12:36:00-05:00

MASS found a critical flaw in the ad hoc system: contaminated waste was being dumped illegally, frequently ending up right back in the water table. In response, MASS designed a facility with two distinct but equally vital jobs: it treats both people and their waste water.

Kyle Vanhemert talked with Michael Murphy CEO and co-founder of MASS Design Group, regarding their design for the first permanent cholera treatment center in Haiti.

Dignifying Design

2012-10-07T18:54:00-04:00

Though unemployment is widespread among designers and architects, there exists a world of products, places and processes in desperate need of redesign. Imagine if designers — uniquely trained to listen and observe, and to improve the way things function, feel and look — were, like the Enterprise Rose fellows, embedded in schools, nonprofit organizations, health clinics, religious institutions and government offices, where they could experience community needs and behavioral patterns firsthand.

First cancer treatment center in Rwanda breaks ground

2012-07-24T17:08:00-04:00

...the Butaro center, in the northern part of the country, will be the first to offer comprehensive care — including diagnosis, chemotherapy, surgery, follow-up treatment, and palliative care.

MASS Design Group is partnering with the Rwandan Ministry of Health (MOH) and Partners in Health (PIH) to build the first permanent cancer treatment center in Rwanda. With the help of Jeff Gordon Children's Foundation funding inpatient facilities, the new Cancer Centre for Excellence will be the first facility of its kind to bring state of the art care to Rwanda, provide access to cancer treatments, and host robust training programs through a partnership with Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Facility-based cancer registries in Rwanda revealed a total of 3,430 diagnosed cancer cases between 2007 to 2011, among which 320 were children under the age of 15. Before this year, cancer care was sporadic, with no integrated treatments available without leaving the country. The new center will be the national referral site for cancer, providing a full spectrum of cancer care.

Rwanda has long valued developing comprehensive programs while building infrastructure. Cancer care training start...

MASS Design Group wins Zumtobel Award for Butaro Hospital

2012-07-03T17:04:00-04:00

"The [Butaro] project has a high relevance, since it can be applied as a solution to similar regions with limited opportunities and high risks of infection. [...] Also remarkable is the excellent quality of the buildings that were built exclusively with local workers.”

The Butaro Hospital in Rwanda was praised as innovative and cost-efficient by the Zumtobel Award 2012 jury, ultimately winning in the category of "Built Environment." Over 230 projects were submitted in for the 2012 Zumtobel Group Award in this category. Entries were received from 22 nations while the projects themselves spanned some 30 countries.

The Butaro Hospital in Rwanda was praised as an “innovative [and] cost-efficient [in] technology and design strategy in the category "Built Environment." Over 230 projects were submitted in for the 2012 Zumtobel Group Award in this category. Entries were received from 22 nations while the projects themselves spanned some 30 countries.

The Butaro Hospital is built in the Burera District, which was one of the last two districts in Rwanda to receive a district hospital. The hospital now serves a population of over 400,000 people. Innovative design developed in collaboration with infectious disease specialists from Partners in Health and ...

A Call for Design Entrepreneurs

2012-05-07T14:25:00-04:00

MASS Design Group is one of a handful of nonprofits showing that design isn’t just for the wealthy, nor is it just image-making. The challenge, for MASS and others trying to do public service design work, is to make their operations financially sustainable. As students, MASS provided much of their work on the Butaro Hospital pro bono, but they are not students anymore. The staff of MASS eclipsed 20 in the past year...

MASS Design Group Named Designer of the Year

2012-02-10T14:04:00-05:00

The young and energetic collaborative MASS Design Group has just recently been named Contract magazines’ 2012 Designer of the Year. [...] Contract praised MASS' philosophy, "designing for dignity, to improve people’s lives through design, and to be a primary example for how designers can rethink their role in a world of increasingly global impact."

Check out Archinect's Showcase feature on MASS Design's Butaro Hospital