Ruggles Corridor Integrated Public Art Project

In collaboration with the Roxbury community and stakeholders, City of Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola, poet Elizabeth Bradfield, and photographer Don West, Jenny Sabin Studio's approach to this unique project calling for integrated art for the Ruggles Corridor celebrates heritage by honoring the existing aesthetic of the Roxbury neighborhood through material interventions that celebrate local cultural identity and the power of connection found in voice, light, and place.

The design for the project honors the voices and stories of Roxbury residents through thematic glazing, narrative text in the form of a community poem, portraits of local Roxbury luminaries by Don West, social seating elements, lighting features by night, and flexible areas for gathering. Building upon public comments received on the Ruggles Streetscape art elements at public meetings held in 2018-2019, the artist conducted multiple community workshops with local residents and participated in public events including Open Streets Boston in Roxbury and the Roxbury Poetry Festival during the spring and summer of 2023.

The team has worked with residents of the Madison Park Development Corporation, local activists, community leaders, and luminaries such as Mrs. Pauline Sheridan and her Jolly Walkers group to inform the collaborative design process. Through the workshops, the team collected stories, visuals, and input from the community to be integrated into special etched glazing in the form of portraits, a community poem, and thematic benches. The connected set of interventions will promote pedestrian accessibility and safety by calming traffic through lighting treatments and highlighting the Ruggles Corridor.

Jenny Sabin Studio will bring high-performance design with durable and long-lasting applications to the Roxbury neighborhood with close attention to issues of scale and local material cues. Created together with Liz, Porsha, Don, and the engineers, this project for the Ruggles Corridor features a generative design strategy that changes and adjusts to contextual parameters in answer to input from the community. Importantly, Jenny Sabin Studio specializes in computational design and digital fabrication with interests in ecological, material and community-orientated interventions.

The project will feature four innovative solutions (narrative text in the form of a community poem, glazed portraits, benches, and lighting) that together form a positive and unique contribution to the urban fabric, local pedestrian streetscape and areas of public gathering to stimulate community exchange.

The project will integrate environment and community through advancements in computational design and contemporary digital fabrication techniques to generate an ornamented and connected set of architectural interventions that envelope and activate daily routines and exchanges in the Roxbury neighborhood. The conceptual design strategy is purposefully open and adjustable, allowing for changes throughout the design process, which is understood to be in collaboration with the Boston Art Commission, local residents, the landscape architect and the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture.

Inspired by the voices and stories of Roxbury residents and in collaboration with Liz, Porsha, and Don, the generative design strategy for this project will make these stories visible through material layers, narrative text, and light. Through the content collected during the public workshops and events, design iterations include experimental geometries that share synthetic relationships with local natural systems, thus providing playful ornamentation that integrate seamlessly with the streetscape and buildings. The generative design strategy is intended to respond to and accommodate the final architectural and landscape/streetscape designs throughout all stages of the design process, from schematic design to fabrication and production.

Project Presentation