The design for MassArt’s new Design and Media Center establishes a new identity and welcoming threshold for the College along Boston’s “Avenue of the Arts,” connecting for the first time all of its adjacent buildings and providing greater accessibility to campus. The Center is designed to not only enhance the quality of collaborative teaching spaces for the College but also to reveal the vitality of the art and design.
Photography: Richard Barnes
community within, translating Mass Art’s spirit of design innovation and aspirations for its cross-disciplinary curriculum into a four-story, a state-of-the-art flexible system of studios, galleries and shared technical spaces.

Located at a critical intersection of campus and city, within a dense urban block comprised of a wide range of buildings from different eras, the new Center is built upon the historical foundations of an early 20th-century structure. The design weaves together old and new with the transformation of a former brick gymnasium into a renewed, glass-enclosed, monumental volume. Its transparent new face to the city is a dramatic shift. Photography: Richard Barnes
from the opacity of the original building and establishes a dynamic collaborative environment, a new front door and crossroads at the heart of campus. Now a distinct and visible presence on Huntington Avenue, the Center, supported by a series of four king-post trusses and punctuated by an entry vestibule along the easte...