2017-2018 | Bird Street Community Center

From 2017 to 2018 our chapter partnered with the Bird Street Community Center in the Dorchester area, an after-school youth development program for grade school student. Bird Street’s goal is to instill in their students intellectual and leadership qualities that will help them strive for academic success as well as success in life. The students of Bird Street are local to Dorchester, and use the Community Center after school to do their homework, play basketball or other sports in their indoor court, or socialize. Bird Street felt that by partnering with us we could instill in their students knowledge about architecture that may expose them to a variety of new academic and employment opportunities through a hands-on design process.

Upon visiting the Bird Street Community Center, we documented and measured each of their rooms, and we met with students and faculty and discussed the different spaces the students used in order to better understand how we could make a positive impact in their academic and daily lives.  We then revisited the Community Center, allowing students to draw on printed floor plans of the space what they would like us to construct for them. Based on the student participation, and discussions with the Bird Street faculty, we decided to design a set of modular furniture for this space that allows the students to gather more comfortably and doubles as a storage unit for their games and belongings. After several group design charettes, and periodic check ins with Bird Street faculty, our final design includes four seating benches that include 12 lockers, 4 ottomans, and two collapsable work spaces.