The Women’s Building
The Women’s Building is a new global hub for the women’s and girls’ rights movements. As a project architect I worked on the development of the exterior facade and interior design. This project would transform the former Bayview Correctional Center, an abandoned women’s prison, into a place of activism and action. The design DNA of the building was driven by workshops and engagement with representatives of the building’s future users.
The project was deeply linked to the preservation and restoration of the existing correctional center. One of the primary challenges in designing a new building alongside the old was selective demolition of existing structures to merge floor levels and building lot lines. The building is located in FEMA’s Zone AE for high risk flooding and was designed to be dry flood-proofed.
Role: Project Architect
Architect: Ten Berke
Location: Cambridge, MA
SF: 135,000
The new facade was designed to perform programmatically along multiple axes. The glass line relative to the floor slab leans outward in more communal areas to create welcoming window benches.
The glass pulls in at private work spaces to provide a sense of enclosure and reduce glare. Sculpted precast concrete fascias provide integrated shading. The shape of the facade forms are curvilinear, yet crisp and the range of program uses within the building shapes the facade both horizontally and vertically.
Material Texture
Zoning Analysis - Multiple schemes for adding additional square footage were studied with a final scheme of demolishing the existing building up to the 1st structural bay and adding new floor area being the preferred choice given program requirements and cost/sf value.
Environmental Analysis
Window Bay Design
Window Bay Design
Window Bay Design
Physical Model
Workspaces in the building were designed around a gradient of types that ranged from unstructured social space, to group work areas, meeting rooms and private offices.
Private offices and workstations were located along the perimeter to take advantage of natural light with social space and shared resources linking the core of the building together.
The existing building facade was designed to be preserved and restored, with select historic and ornamental features from the existing interior spaces salvaged for display and reuse. The existing building was built on wooden piles and required significant structural updates to achieve program and flooding mitigation goals.
