Connect Kendall Square Competition

The Connect Kendall Square Competition looked holistically at the growing and changing district of Cambridge framed by MIT, Massachusetts Avenue and the Charles River.  Gina and Brie led Sasaki’s participation on a team led by SiteLab Urban Studio and including Land Collective, helped develop a proposal entitled “The Kendall Commons Public Realm Framework Plan”. The Plan focused upon several key elements: (1) Establish A Magnet for Public Life; (2) Create Identity and Coherence that is rooted in local culture and the promise of the future – Essentially Kendall; (3) Define a Framework that is temporal, malleable, and personal, (4) Making It Your Own; and (5) Do So in Small Steps, Bold Ideas. But most importantly, the team envisioned Kendall Square as a holistic Commons – building upon the Cambridge tradition – a set of collective and democratic resources. This empathetic approach to the spaces used by the citizens of Cambridge, and in particular those living in the Kendall neighborhood, focused on a humanistic approach to public space-making: universally inclusive civic open space; local resources; surrounding culture; and ecological systems. This “new urban commons” is comprised of the information, networks, goods, and services that define and connect broad communities.

Although our submission wasn’t selected in the final round, it was universally acknowledged that our team had a BLAST inventing and presenting our proposal – ideas we believe in wholeheartedly.