A faceted facade surrounding a color changing jewel, 407 Washington Street Cinema is a storefront designed to draw in and retain passersby.
This project was designed in the first half of my Urban Design Principles studio at RISD in Fall 2012.
The entire semester's work was based around exploring urban design through the many scales of the city.
The first part of the project involved getting lost in Boston, and observing parts of the city as you made your way back to South Station. I chose to examine people breaking any unwritten rules of walking.
From there, I began looking at how people arrived and moved through Boston, starting with the scale of the city...
...into the scale of the street...
...and finally at the scale of the building.
A color changing ticket booth lights up to act as a beacon, visible from all surrounding public transit stops, intersections, and ends of the street.
The paving pattern was designed with what I had learned from the project's initial exercise. Subtle angled lines in the sidewalk direct the natural perpendicular movement of through-traffic towards the ticket windows.
The specific location of the ticket booth and ground pattern selectively directed the slow, wandering flâneurs of the city.
Much like an eddy along the banks of river, the undulating walls and ceiling of the carved-out facade retains visitors and passersby.
