Blazing sunshine beating down on a parking lot near the Innovation and Design Building in Boston’s Seaport District on a recent August afternoon didn’t deter a group of Black and Latinx teenagers excited to spray paint their names with laser-cut stencils on BeND, a curvy public inhabitable installation they built as the culminating project for a free summer program created to giving low-income Boston youth a pathway into the design and construction industry.
“You can put your name on the structure six times but be careful not to walk over what has already been spray-painted,” says Parke MacDowell, an architect at Boston-based architecture firm Payette who led the design and fabrication of BeND and developed the curriculum for the 22 students.