By Sarah Pope
Executive Director, The Menokin Foundation

Away from the quiet fields of Menokin, I traveled to bustling Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 5 for a much anticipated day at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).  Twelve architecture graduate students in Professor Jorge Silvetti’s studio, “Ruins, Memory and the Imagination,” would be presenting their individual projects for a Conservation Research Laboratory; a Visitors Center; and Visitors Waterside Harbor at Menokin, as well as the design of all elements necessary to structure and present the Menokin site narratives to the visitor.

Students created a spectacular three-dimensional wooden model of the terrain of the Menokin site, along with the Menokin house site, that will be on display at our Visitors Center.

Reviewers on the studio panel were: Linda Pollack, AIA, ASLA Associate, Marpillero Pollack Architects, New York, NY; Reid Freeman, AIA, Principal at Architecture Operations DPC, New York, NY; Carlos Jimenez, Carlos Jimenez Studio, Houston, TX; Tim Love, AIA, Utile Inc. Architecture and Planning, Boston, MA; and Michael Hayes, Professor of Architectural Theory, Harvard GSD.

We’re planning for a future curated exhibit and publication that presents the Harvard students’ innovative ideas to the public.  More details will be forthcoming, but in the meantime, here are themes and associated designs that floated to the top for me as I watched the project presentations:

1)      Designing for flexibility: one student designed very cool mobile archaeological stations or pods that can be moved around the site as we continue our investigations.

2)      Finding inspiration in painting and fine arts: another student found inspiration from the lines he saw on the Menokin landscape, and his proposed Visitors Center evoked the work of artist Marco Migani.

3)      The changing terrain of the site: plateau and ravine, water and woods, open and enclosed: I was particularly enamored by one student’s design of a bridge and attached Visitors Center that spans a ravine to the south of the Menokin house site.

4)      Siting and perspective-relationship of new buildings to Menokin: Some students anchored their Visitors Center to the Menokin house—at certain corners of the house or on its central axis—that created a visible dialog between the historic and contemporary structures. Others tucked their new facilities away from the house site into the tree line of our expansive woods, reinforcing the flat, openness of the plateau surrounding the house site.

Above all, the interpersonal, human aspect of this studio—meeting the students, getting to know them and enjoying their unique perspectives on Menokin—was extremely fulfilling to me, as well as to our Trustees, staff, and friends who met the students in February.