Site | Program | Polemic (2018) studio by Greg Stroh

rose-colored boston AS PART OF THE CUMULATE COMMONWEALTH STUDY

Cumulate Commonwealth experiments with the notion of the found, our desire to collect, and the misconstruation of figures within architecture. The accessions of this project are the result of things that already exists in Boston. A brief survey of the city revealed aspects of the everyday: transit stations, the wharf, the monument, the church, and the rowhouse.

Selective fragments and discrete notions of each found typology are disintegrated, then mediated through the tangible forms of images, constructs, and sacred objects. These relics, in five separate forms, are proposed to be safeguarded at Suffolk Downs. This near-vacant and indolent racetrack is the historic site where Seabiscuit was discovered in 1936.

5 things, 5 ways

Each found typology offers distinct information for misappropriation. The linear tunnels of the transit station, land extensions of the wharf, the façade of the rowhouse, and iconography of the church and monument. These aspects are reconfigured allowing fictions and realities to emerge through the making of illustration, constructs, near-objects, tablets, and icons.

By curating and reconfiguring architectural and civil typologies found throughout greater Boston, programmatic necessities emerge as innate qualities of thing and place. Speculation on the physical traits, cultural milieu, and an ineffable sense of place has led to five distinct Constructs: the Lacuna, Belvedere, Rampart Boardwalk, Seabiscuit Memorial, and Dark Archives.