WILLIAMS COLLEGE NATURAL DYE LAB
Design for a new program space within the Williams College Spencer Art Building in collaboration with artist and Professor Pallavi Sen. The Natural Dye Lab, located within the Printmaking studio and adjacent to the meadow that Sen cultivates annually for dye-making plants, is an expansion of Sen’s teaching, which combines printmaking, textiles, and the natural environment. Over 800 hand-painted tiles define the lab, covering a 16’ tall “backsplash” that forms the backdrop for the space.
We founded The Mastheads, a public design program focused on the literary heritage of Pittsfield, MA. The Mastheads operates around five mobile writing studios that represent fragments of historic author’s homes and activate landscapes throughout the city.
A companion to the restored Agrippa Hull House, this working residence for a painter is a stone masonry structure inspired by remnants of agrarian foundations on a historic site. The building has two levels. The first floor includes a double height painting studio on the north end and a double height living space on the south end, connected by a cooking and dining zone in the center of the plan. Above the kitchen, the sleeping and bathing area is tucked like a wooded nest, fully wrapped in white oak with an oversized skylight framing the clouds. On the first floor, white walls, painting cubbies, pin-up storage, and a scalar play of squares unifies the rhythm of the steel windows with the millwork.
RESTORATION OF THE AGRIPPA HULL HOUSE
Agrippa Hull was born in 1759 in Northampton, Massachusetts. He moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts when he was 8 years old and as a teenager and a free Black man became the trusted attendant and messenger of General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a member of George Washington’s staff. Hull participated in nearly all of the major battles of the Revolutionary War and returned to Stockbridge at the age of 24, purchasing land on Cherry Hill Road at the age of 30. This project restores the farmhouse that Hull built on his land, which, according to surviving stone foundations as well as artistic and written records of the property, also included a series of agrarian outbuildings.
The Westside Riverway Park unites social and ecological goals in the heart of a historic neighborhood. The linear pavilion is a bridge between the street and the water, providing seating and a stage to revive a tradition of Block Parties, and a canoe launch for recreation and stewardship of the Housatonic River. The shaped landscape creates gathering points within a large lawn, bounded by a buffer zone of native plantings.
Three sculptural utility buildings serve a 70-acre nature compound in Williamstown, MA. The three structures wrap a central courtyard with generous eaves, breezeways, overhangs, and oversized doors that allow for a continuous flow from the inner courtyard through the interior spaces and out into the forests beyond. Clay tiles provide a rich texture that defines the roof as the primary spatial driver of the buildings. The clay tiles dynamically respond to the changing light and shadows throughout the day - at times appearing flat black, and at times revealing a prism of rusty hues.
This one-story house sits on a steep wooded site with views oriented toward the Green Mountains of Vermont. The structure tucks into the ledge, using an extension of the cast concrete foundation walls as the exterior wall surface. Low eaves and a steeply pitched roof define the interior space, which is finished with radiant concrete floors, built-in plywood seating and furnishings, and large-format tilt-turn windows that fill the house with forest air.
A corner park in Pittsfield’s densely populated Morningside neighborhood, this space was designed in partnership with the local elementary school as an outdoor classroom to inspire literary, spatial, and mathematical learning. The 26 concrete sculptural forms at the park each represent a letter of the alphabet.
Heirloom Lodge is a transformation of a Revolutionary War-era homestead into an agriturismo restaurant run by chef-owner Matt Straus. The design is a meeting between the historic, three-story structure and a new single-story kitchen, which opens onto the surrounding landscape.
A structure to distribute free hats in the winter, built onto a guardrail on an otherwise unbuildable piece of land in the Westside neighborhood where kids wait for the bus in the mornings and get dropped off in the afternoons.
An aging-in-place house with a softly curved interior and a hard shell. Interior lofted spaces are carved out of plaster forms that reflect light from expansive windows that frame views into the surrounding forest. The exterior peaked forms are organized into three volumes for different programs.
This house is located at the border of Massachusetts and Vermont, and its masonry exterior references a series of stone buildings built in nearby New Ashford and Lanesborough in the 1830s, which were quarried from marble and granite veins running through the area. The house is clad with thin gray brick set with lime mortar, with local granite used at the window lintels and sills. The aggregation of the thin brick profile creates a highly textured effect across the building, regulated by the consistent geometry and proportions of the windows. The first and second floor window proportions remain consistent across all four sides of the house, and the house sits at the top of a knoll, allowing the sun angles to illuminate the quiet interior of the house throughout the day.
A house for one, overlooking an agrarian valley to expansive views on all sides. The interior is organized around blocks of saturated color and material, set within an otherwise quiet shell.
This project inserts a round library into the heart of a historic carriage barn. The inner face of the library walls provides for book storage, and the outer perimeter of the library walls include a curving stair, two powder rooms, kitchen storage, and storage for a knitting studio. The round library defines an open family space, surrounded by rooms for sleeping, eating, cooking, and creating.
A two-part installation of poems on trees, designed for The Mastheads using arboretum supplies. Tree Poems Part I includes 80 poems etched onto green aluminum tree tags, hung within the branches of the street trees in the Downtown Pittsfield walking loop. Text is written by Pittsfield elementary school students within the Fireside program, developed by Mastheads Literary Director Sarah Trudgeon.
A two-part installation of poems on trees, designed for The Mastheads using arboretum supplies. Tree Poems Part II includes 60 poems embroidered onto tan tree straps, wrapped around trees throughout the campus of The Clark.Text is written by Pittsfield elementary school students within the Fireside program, developed by Mastheads Literary Director Sarah Trudgeon.
What we’re working on now.