Project name: GrubStreet—Non Profit Center for Creative Writing
Project overview: GrubStreet’s Center for Creative Writing is designed to enable the group’s mission to “ensure writers of all backgrounds share their stories” and express the organization’s creative, rigorous, and inclusive spirit.
Occupying a designated-nonprofit space in a luxury housing complex in Boston’s Seaport, the 13,000-square-foot fit-out composes—like a story follows a plot structure—a spatial narrative of public and private zones. A cafe, bookstore, and presentation space are situated off the sidewalk, while flexible classrooms and open workspaces line a second-level “social street.” These spaces are enlivened by a shape language of circular writing nooks, triangular collaboration booths, porthole podcast studio windows, and arched openings developed hand-in-pen with “Grubbies” (faculty, staff, and students). Realized in a palette of plywood, paint, and fabric, the variety of shapes and surfaces suggests that this story is open not only to interpretation, but also intervention as its occupants grow into and through the space.
Ultimately the architectural narrative gives way to the stories of aspiring authors, with literary output spilling down the stair to reach a broader audience. A verse crafted in a classroom is shared on the writers’ stage. A novel drafted within a nook appears in the bookstore below—then is discussed over coffee in the adjoining cafe. A podcast produced in the recording studio reaches ears beyond the building. Designed to enable and express GrubStreet’s mission, the space also empowers those within—a Center for Creative Writing that is the epicenter of “an expansive and equitable artistic ecosystem.”
