Public Program | Sheila O’Donnell, “Conversations with Place”

Name: Public Program | Sheila O’Donnell, “Conversations with Place”
Start: 2024-11-12T19:30:00-04:00
Location: 48 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, United States, Massachusetts 02138

Schedule

Tue Nov 12 2024 at 07:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

48 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, United States, Massachusetts 02138 | Cambridge, MA

Every inhabited place is defined by and read through its buildings and constructed landscapes. This talk will address recent work completed with John Tuomey. Our work is deeply engaged with place. It shapes how we respond to each site’s particular characteristics and how we make places within our buildings.
We converse with place in a number of different ways. These include representations of place and memories of places which may be or may not be accurate. Place is more than a physical phenomenon. It includes aspects of time, culture, climate, ethos, essence, and society. We talk about our buildings being designed from the ground up and from the inside out. In that context, I think of both “ground” and “inside” as aspects of “place.” When everything is “in its place,” everything is all right. It’s good.
We’re not looking for the abstract perfection of an ideal form. Instead, our designs are derived through careful study of site constraints through a process of closely noticing local conditions. The idea is to arrive at a form that speaks back to and makes new sense of its situation, to approach a deeper sort of simplicity by accepting the complicated origins that make up the shape of things.