Design-Lab in Boston, MA. Architecture

Design-lab

Design-Lab is an inter-disciplinary collaborative actively pursuing research and practice in design-focusing on architecture, graphic design and photography. Founded in 2002 by Andrew Watkins and Jeremy Munn, Design-Lab is an open structured and evolving agglomeration of talented individuals. design-lab is committed to the exploration of design processes valuing the dialogue between disciplines of design for comprehensive solutions to traditional and non-traditional problems. Design-Lab is interested in connections within and to the field of design that promote and foster theoretical dialogues with practical applications.
Design-Lab believes that design should be a comprehensive practice-small-to-large, theoretical-to-real and discipline-to-discipline. By involving multiple disciplines throughout the design process and application, design-lab believes that productive connections can be exploited for innovative and expressive solutions to design problems.
Urban infrastructures are flexible systems, allowing for a multiplicity of programs, spatial configurations, architectural typologies, and social structures-live-work relationships, commerce, public gatherings, recreation, and political activity. Transportation networks, utility lines, demographic dispersions, or social configurations may all be forms of urban infrastructures. This exhibit is interested in pushing the limits of urban infrastructures, occupying the systems in ways that were not originally planned and creating architecture that explores new possibilities that build upon and stretch a given system, locating itself in its boundaries.
As the physical and cultural context of existing infrastructural systems shift and change, divergent forms of occupation become possible through alternate programmatic mixes, social organization, and new technology. The established system provides an opportunistic substructure to a new organization, manifesting itself in a palimpsest of new and old systems, a reinterpretation of an existing system, or an addition within a system. These combinations create diverse environments for architectural and urban exploration.