Comprised of five Studio G employees, one from Helios Design Group, and a Boston Architectural College student, team Studio G-Force participated in a 72-hour design/build competition known as Common Build over the weekend. It is part of Common Boston, an annual design festival celebrating the built environment and highlighting different neighborhoods. The teams competing respond to a real community need with their final designs. They were restricted to a $200 budget with 2 ½ days to design/build/install/present their projects. The site for this year’s competition was the Fenway Victory Gardens.

 

 Organizers thanked the Fenway Garden Society for hosting the competition, and FGS President Mike Mennonno expressed his gratitude to participants:

“You really brought your A-Game, and surpassed everyone’s expectations.  You brought the wider community in and the garden community out, and that’s exactly what we had hoped for.”

Our site research and user interviews led us to focus on finding a way to bring the greater community into the gardens. We created a series of five chrome sculptural pieces that were placed along the main paths of the gardens, to act as landmarks on the site that would get the attention of the passers-by and draw them in. Each sculpture included a short paragraph having to do with an aspect of the history of the site. Our thought was that by educating the public about the gardens, they would begin to see the gardens as a neighborhood asset, and would be more invested in its future. The use of the household items references a story from the gardens’ beginnings, when such objects were said to surface in the soil, which had been filled from the Kenmore T Station construction project. We also utilized the sculptures as planters, not only so they would be a more cohesive part of the overall gardens, but also to allude to the potential for peaceful coexistence of manmade objects and nature in the urban environment.