Boston based research and design firm, PRAUD, shared with us the West End Museum which is a community-based museum in Boston dedicated to documenting the history of the West End of Boston. The museum especially captures the immigrant era which dates approximately from 1880 to the West Ends destruction by eminent domain in 1958. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Despite the museum’s continuous effort, it still remains as a small, not well-known museum in Boston. Therefore, the museum is trying to implement a new strategy to out reach to the public as well as tourists in the city.
PRAUD’s strategy is to propose a pavilion and street furnitures that can reach to the people in other neighborhoods as well as tourists coming to Boston. The strategy is to make an urban landscape field on the site by aggregating piece-meals of street furnitures that will be donated by each organization or resident for a main event of the West End Museum show-case. After the event, those piece-meals will be displaced around major public spaces in Boston so that people can recognize West End Museum and its neighborhood without actually coming to West End.
Therefore, displaced urban furnitures can work as urban follies that can be recognized by the public and help them learn and understand the rich history of West End.
