Justice Is Beauty

News 16-3-2020 Archidose 380

Justice Is Beauty: MASS Design Group
Michael Murphy, Alan Ricks
The Monacelli Press, December 2019

Founded in 2008, MASS Design Group collaborated with Partners In Health and the Rwanda Ministry of Health to design and build the Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda, a masterwork of architecture that also uniquely serves a community in need. Since then, MASS has grown into a dynamic collaborative of architects, planners, engineers, filmmakers, researchers, and public health professionals working in more than a dozen countries in the fields of design, research, policy, education, and strategic planning.

Amid ongoing recognition (the 2018 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, the 2017 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture), MASS’s most recent project, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, has been featured in more than 400 publications, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post. Mark Lamster of Dallas Morning News called the memorial “the single greatest work of American architecture of the twenty-first century.”

Justice Is Beauty highlights MASS’s first decade of designing, researching, and advocating for an architecture of justice and human dignity. With more than thirty projects built or under construction and some 200,000 people served, MASS has pioneered an immersive approach in the practice of architecture that provides the infrastructure, buildings, and physical systems necessary for growth, dignity, and well-being, while always engaging local communities with attention to the specifics of cultural context and social needs.

dDAB Commentary:

I'm writing this review on Sunday, March 15, two days after Trump declared a national emergency over COVID-19. Universities are closed, moving to online classrooms; sporting and other events have been canceled; and Americans are hunkering down to stave off a virus that has hit other countries hard, especially Italy, which has a countrywide quarantine. It's a strange time, to say the least, and it's hard to think of other things besides the welfare of family, friends, and other loved ones, and anticipating how the virus will reshape lives in the coming weeks and months. It's particularly difficult to find much relevance in architecture (though I'm sure there will be attempts in the coming days and weeks); so far the death of Vittorio Gregotti from coronavirus earlier today is the only news where architecture is aligned with what is on most people's minds.

So as I rummaged through the books I've received from publishers to discover any alignments between architecture and the virus sweeping the world, one book stood high above the rest: Justice Is Beauty. The book is a monograph of MASS Design Group, the Boston-area firm founded by Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks in 2007. Their first project — "The Genesis" in the monograph — was the Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda, an impressive project that drew a lot of attention to MASS and led them to take on other projects in Butaro and elsewhere in Rwanda (they now have an office in Kigali), a country many US architects would never dare to tread. Beyond Rwanda, but in a similar vein, the firm designed a Tuberculosis Hospital and Cholera Treatment Center in Haiti. Put another way, MASS has worked in places and on building types that make them more accustomed to what's happening in the wake of COVID-19 than any architects I can think of.

Setting aside the fortuitous nature of the coronavirus, MASS Design Group, and this review, Justice Is Beauty is a beautiful and thought-provoking monograph. Like other monographs it has plenty of professional photography (Iwan Baan shoots all their work), but Justice Is Beauty departs from the norm by focusing exclusively on built work, diving deeply into a few of the dozen buildings presented in the book, and including conversations that, among other things, revisit their Butaro Hospital ten years after it was completed. One of those deep(er) dives is the last project in the book, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which was dedicated in Montgomery, Alabama, in October 2018. The project received lots of positive attention when it opened and revealed that MASS is capable of applying their unique design approach to projects beyond hospitals. It comes 300 pages after Murphy explains the "Or, and, Is" of the cover, how a choice between justice and beauty is a false dichotomy; MASS's work shows that the two can work together remarkably well.

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Author Bio:

Michael Murphy is the founding principal and executive director of MASS Design Group. As a designer, writer, and teacher, his work investigates the social and political consequences of the built world. ... Alan Ricks is a founding principal and the chief design officer of MASS Design Group. He leads strategy and design of the firm, which has projects in over a dozen countries that range from design to research to policy ...

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