MASS Design Group turned 15 years old this year. To commemorate almost two decades in practice, the nonprofit convened principals, designers, and clients from its four offices in Boston; Poughkeepsie, New York; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Kigali, Rwanda; and journalists, artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars from around the world for Abundant Futures / Live, a program it held at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston on November 10.
At Abundant Futures / Live, MASS framed “abundance” as a multivalent goal to work toward collectively across disciplines, an antithesis of the austerity imposed at the federal and state levels these past few years on the public in the form of budget cuts and draconian legislative actions, measures that have impacted both the nonprofit and its network—HUD, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and National Endowment for the Arts, to name a few collaborators.
The day of talks—coupled with music performances, poetry readings, and breakout panels—spoke to how MASS has expanded its scope from its first commission, the Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda, to include affordable housing, libraries, civil rights memorials, urban design, and other typologies, all charged with the same social justice-oriented approach that’s guided the nonprofit since its founding in 2010.
MASS Design Group’s Christian Benimana, Jha D Amazi, Sierra Bainbridge, Alan Ricks, Amie Shao, and Patricia Gruits gave individual talks and welcomed speakers.
“The event was a constellation of many things,” Ricks told AN, a few days after Abundant Futures / Live wrapped up. “At its most basic level, it captured the diversity of our work these past few years that we’re doing spread across the eight labs we have. What we’ve come to realize is how often they intersect with one another.” Ricks continued: “By bringing everyone into the same place, we hoped to spur more systemic change.”
For Gruits, the timing of Abundant Futures / Live was strategic. “The Center for Effective Philanthropy just held their national conference a few weeks ago,” Gruits added. “Nonprofits are seeing an 81 percent surge in demand, and yet 68 percent [of nonprofits] say conditions are limiting their abilities to provide services. There’s a mismatch right now between what nonprofits need, and the small percentage of philanthropies stepping up and giving more.”
Against Scarcity, Toward Abundance
The Boston Globe culture columnist Jeneé Osterheldt, Ezra Klein of The New York Times, and Harvard University history professor Sarah Lewis spoke at Abundant Futures; as did Yale School of Architecture dean Deborah Berke, engineer Hanif Kara, and Lesley Lokko of the African Futures Institute. Harvard Graduate School of Design dean Sarah Whiting was in attendance, as was the latest gaggle of Loeb Fellows.
Mohamed Ali Diini, founder of Iftin Global; William Kamkwamba, Moving Windmills Project; architect Moshe Safdie; GBH president Susan Goldberg; Nashira Baril, founder of the Neighborhood Birth Center; Brooklyn Public Library CEO Linda Johnson; and others discussed challenges civic leaders face amid federal cuts to USAID, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other agencies so many entities depend on for project financing.
“The government told us to go fund ourselves,” Goldberg said in her presentation, in regard to the Trump administration’s recent divestment from PBS and Corporation for Public Broadcasting, garnering light boos and jeers from the crowd.
GBH, the local PBS Boston branch, lost almost $20 million in funding thanks to last summer’s budget cuts, Goldberg added. GBH has since launched its “Fund the Future” capital campaign to raise $225 million, to get through these next few years. Videotaping and livestreaming of Abundant Futures / Live was provided by NPR’s Boston GBH Forum Network, as nonprofit media partner, to support the cause.
A similar plight has fallen upon Iftin Global, a nonprofit based in Mogadishu, Somalia, that offers job training to young, at-risk adults. In Ali Diini’s presentation, he spoke about his childhood in Somalia, relocation to Ohio during the civil war, and how, after law school, he moved back to Mogadishu to help rebuild.
Iftin Global has since partnered with MASS and made strides in helping young Somalis exit armed terrorist groups for good paying jobs, but cuts to USAID now jeopardize the progress Ali Diini has made there.
MASS received a $600,000 grant from USAID in 2021 to help realize the Iftin Peace Hub in Caabudwaaq, Somalia, estimated to cost $1.5 million in total. But MASS and Ali Diini were told their funding had been slashed last January, when USAID was essentially abolished by the White House. (Atul Gawande, a former USAID official, told The New Yorker hundreds-of-thousands of people will die this year alone because of the cuts.) Nevertheless, the groups remain committed to seeing the project come to fruition, Ali Diini affirmed.
This past summer, MASS completed the Snow Country Prison Japanese American Internment Memorial in North Dakota. That project was steered by the Santa Fe branch of MASS, led by Joseph Kunkel, principal and director of the firm’s Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab. Closer to home, Jha D Amazi, a MASS principal that helms the Public Memory and Memorials Lab, spoke at the ICA about her journey as a Metco student from Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan to designing important civic monuments in downtown Boston.
Amazi worked with artist Hank Willis Thomas on The Embrace, the new memorial for Coretta and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Boston Common; and artist Harmonia Rosales on another sculpture, Memorial to Enslaved Persons, at Kings Chapel. The latter honors the 219 enslaved African congregants of the historic Anglican church, and tells the story of Boston’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. Amazi and Rosales are nearing completion on an indoor mural taking place on the Kings Chapel’s ceiling above the nave, as part of the effort.
The Neighborhood Birth Center, founded by Nashira Baril, is another project underway in MASS Design Group’s backyard, this time in Roxbury, presented at Abundant Futures / Live.
Baril gave an overview of how, by the turn of the 20th century, many families gave birth at home with midwives, but a nefarious campaign by the federal government quickly hampered the practice, forcing African-Americans into hospitals where they continue to experience systemic racism, and much higher postpartum mortality rates in comparison to their white peers. Baril is now partnering with MASS to build birthing centers in Roxbury, but also Lynn and Worcester, Massachusetts.
The Next 15 Years
Ezra Klein, fresh from his book tour, was invited to give closing words at the ICA—perhaps the most polemical of presenters. Klein walked the audience through the thinking laid out in his New York Times bestseller, Abundance, that of reinventing liberalism as an ideology “that builds,” as Klein says. Proponents argue “embracing abundance” is essential to win battleground states, and sway back undecided voters that feel disillusioned by the status quo; skeptics call it “a ‘diet-Coke’ version of Republican Party populism.”
“Even though we don’t always talk about beauty in politics, it is a fundamental human desire, and when it is betrayed, people react,” Klein said at the ICA. “People feel that things have gotten ugly. People feel that we are not connected to beauty, that art is not for them anymore.” Klein continued: “Beautiful things are typically not created by large committees. Beauty is a perspective. … What would it take to bring beauty back into politics?”
Beauty is something both Klein and MASS Design Group take seriously. Justice is Beauty, a 2019 monograph penned by Ricks and Michael Murphy, exemplifies the firm’s ethos. Flash forward six years, the range of speakers at Abundant Futures / Live demonstrated how MASS has grown and diversified since its inception. And given the tempestuous political moment dancing in the background, Ricks said he finds solace in thinking about the long arc of history.
“It was in times like ours when groups like the ACLU and NAACP emerged,” Ricks affirmed. “A history professor, John Fabian Witt, in his New York Times op-ed a month ago was about the uncertainty we have right now, and what’s possible. It was affirming to learn that this has happened before in history. Coming out of the Great Depression and the Jim Crow–era, philanthropists have supported a number of groups.”
Ricks elaborated, moving forward, he hopes MASS takes on more commissions like the New York Public Library branch it’s designing in East New York, Brooklyn. Looking ahead, what will the next 15 years look like at MASS?
“To reflect on something our colleague Jha D Amazi has said about our public memory and memorials work,” Gruits ruminated, “so much of it has been about memorializing and sharing narratives of what’s happened, radical truth telling. A lot of our work has had to do with helping heal the harms imposed on human, animal, and ecological health, so often rooted in trauma. So in the next 15 years,” Gruits continued, “I’d like to emerge into the position of celebrating joy.”
→ Continue reading at The Architect's Newspaper
