For three months, Sasaki Gallery’s summer artist-in-residence David Buckley Borden collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of Sasaki designers to explore how architectural tropes can highlight the role pollinators play in urban ecology. This exploration produced a set of pollinator residencies with a playful nod to common building typologies. During weekly charrettes, the team designed and built a residential tower, a saw-toothed factory, a roadside motel, a luxury studio condo development, and a designer cabin on flood-proof stilts. These small structures are nestled within the garden or sit atop custom pedestals. The pedestal designs are inspired by abstract soil profiles and CAD hatch marks. The team worked with a variety of recycled materials and fabrication techniques, ranging from the CNC machine to old fashioned paint brushes.

The work is on view until Fall 2020 at the Sasaki pollinator garden.

Read an interview with David Buckley Borden and Sasaki’s Sustainability Director, Tamar Warburg here.

Project Team:

Nicholas Barrera

David Buckley Borden

Aubrey Fan

Kelly Farrell

Marlee Gleiberman

Jay Northoff

Felipe Palacio

Lucca Townsend

About Sasaki

Sasaki is an interdisciplinary design firm practicing Architecture, Interior Design, Planning and Urban Design, Space Planning, Landscape Architecture, Ecology, Civil Engineering, and Place Branding. The firm is headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, but practices at an international scale, with a second office in Shanghai, and clients and projects around the globe. Sasaki is known for a uniquely collaborative design process that yields integrated, contextual designs

About the Sasaki Gallery

Sasaki has been hosting exhibitions in our space for over 30 years. We’ve hosted over one hundred both established and emerging artists. We’ve had solo exhibitions, group shows, collaborations, we’ve shown photography, paintings, sculpture, ceramics, mixed-media, and light installations—the whole gamut.

We believe that we are offering a unique opportunity for the artists who show work in this space, where the artwork takes center stage in the daily lives of our 300+ creative employees, clients, and visitors. And the Gallery Committee often returns to this question of what is this meant to do for us -- Are we looking for work related to Sasaki’s mission? Are we a corporate gallery space? Or do we want to be a provocative idea space? 

We have always agreed that our best shows are those that present work that engages, possibly even challenges, the viewers – us. As stated in our design manifesto, we want the Bold, the Ambitious, the Provocative, the Challenging. We want something that brings us joy.

If interested in learning more about Sasaki Gallery opportunities, please reach out to Lucca Townsend at ltownsend@sasaki.com.