‘Grove’ is a temporary installation on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, designed and built as part of the Design Biennial Boston 2015.

Although the exterior resists legibility, glimpses of a viewing hole signal that there is more to see up close. As visitors circumnavigate the installation, they encounter the other viewing holes that are calibrated to various heights. Heads–but not bodies–enter the surprising, communal enclosure; visitors experience the dislocation of being in two spaces at once. The booleaned intersections between pods create a cathedral-like space. The texture and patterning of the fiberglass bears traces of the fabrication process, the way one might see formwork traces in concrete, but here transformed by the thinness and translucency. One might catch glimpses or sounds of others, in what becomes a strangely intimate public enclosure. Visitors become part of the installation itself, a spectacle for viewers who are farther away.

Installations are opportunities to push experimental processes forward that might translate into new building innovations. With this in mind, GLD invented a wet lay-up method of resin-infused fiberglass tape over tailored, inflatable molds. Each of the twelve conic pods was formed separately, with the intersections between them inscribed through computational simulation of the inflation process. The pods were then cut and joined after curing, creating a single composite shell structure. The resultant form is as thin as 2mm in most places–incredibly light but rigid.

Design Biennial Boston is a juried exhibition of emerging architects and designers in the Boston area, and selects the participating firms from an open, anonymous call.

Design: Joel Lamere + Cynthia Gunadi

Project Team: Sophia Chesrow, Grigori Enikolopov, Zain Karsan, Dohyun Lee, Elizabeth Galvez

Thanks: Caitlin Mueller, Steven O. Anderson, John Skibo, Matt Wagers, Chris Dewart, Christopher Gunadi