ENC – Bancroft Design.com

“The Emerald Necklace is a dynamic and evolving work of art. In Boston, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and his collaborators applied their skill, creativity, and imagination to sculpt waterways and landscapes that inspire, calm, and uplift in a growing 19th-century city. Today, Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya (born 1933) continues this legacy. Her climate-responsive fog sculptures placed throughout the Emerald Necklace appear natural but are carefully crafted, just like Olmsted’s parks. Though separated by over a century, Nakaya and Olmsted’s ambitious work with water both illuminate the relationships between the natural and artificial. Olmsted was a master of perceiving and highlighting the “genius of place” – a landscape’s many individual elements that together create a unique experience of a site. Likewise, Nakaya’s site-specific fog sculptures vividly manifest both landscapes’ and weather’s unseen forces.”

Excerpt from FogxFLO Exhibition curated by Jen Mergel

“The project takes place inside The Shattuck Visitor Center ( Henry Hobson Richardson) where Ann Beha Architects recently renovated the interior to set up the Emerald Necklace Conservancy’s offices. The challenge BOS-UA faced is to take the first step into converting the private office space into a temporary gallery space without moving a single wall, nesting their design within the historical and the modern. The organizing force for the project is a liner of interconnected panels that create a new “offset” from the existing layout. Inspired by Olmsted and Nakaya’s work, the exhibit is vibrant and immersive. Therefore the design plays with a “scalloped” panel module to help organize the content and create different experiences. When the liner passes by a window in reacts to it revealing the layers within through a series of cutouts.”

Collaboration with: BOS|UA Architects