We are SHADE
We are an organization of youth creating a community for teens by teens. Our community is built around a temporary summer place we are creating at Donnelly Field. SHADE is a safe hangout spot for teens to come by, find friends, make new ones, and have a good time. SHADE is made possible through Cambridge’s Shade is Social Justice public art competition.
Why Shade
We are trying to address the decline in teens’ mental health, and overall get teenagers outside in a cool 🧊 place, doing things together. Teens nowadays are faced with either feeling unwanted, unwelcomed, and/or excluded. We can change that by solving our problems for ourselves.
Adults are always the ones controlling the money, where it goes, and how it’s used to solve our problems. We want to use funding and help our peers through using our own knowledge and insight about our age group that adults can not provide. At the end of the day, nobody knows teens better than teens.
Who’s helping
Meet the Adult Team
We’re the group of organizations, organizers, creatives, and committed youth collaborators making empowering spaces for our youth to thrive.
Equity Roadmap / Friday Night Hype - Safe spaces for our most vulnerable students, to participate in educational and therapeutic activities through mentorship with positive role models/mentors
- Debbie Bonilla
- Kini Udovicki
- Will Adams
Pneuhaus - bringing the art, craft, and wonder of inflatable and high-performance textile artifacts & experiences
- Levi Bedall
- Matt Muller
- August Lehrecke
Citizens of the World - Black and Brown youth engagement, restorative justice, and Historically Black College and University (HBCU) tours
- Kyrk Morris
Olin College - bringing college students to inspire, learn from, and create alongside community members
- Amon Millner
Cambridge Public Health Department - "If we are telling youth to say NO to substances, what are we giving them to say YES to?", Connor Epsteinkraus
- Sarah Lincoln
- Connor Epsteinkraus
Jen Lee - designer and creative for the people
Buildingways - hands-on, project-based civics, STEM, and city building with youth
- Jeff Goldenson
The site
Location: Donnelly Field, Cambridge, MA
SHADE structure (draft)
Design Reference & Explorations
Concepts | November 28
References & Inspiration
Still very early in the process, we are hoping to develop v.01 of an Open Source Shade System. Something, with a minimal environmental footprint, that any large group of people can assemble, anywhere it’s hot.
- Skin - the shade: textiles (patterns to make them)
- Bones - the structure: scaffolding (sourcing, designing, anchoring, and insuring)
- Organs - the services: to be designed 🫁 air, 💦 water (drinking/cooling spray nozzles), ⚡️ power
Early Blue Sky Brainstorm
Yes Loitering Project
Inspiration
Teenagers face a unique spatial challenge: Old enough to be independently mobile but too young to have homes of their own, they conduct their private lives outside. For the teenage design-researchers of the Yes Loitering project, justice for youth means public spaces where they can “hang out and be themselves” without fear of reprisal. Rather than passive recipients and interlopers in a grown-up’s world, they propose that young people should have authority over the designs and decisions that affect them. "Yes Sitting, Yes Skating, Yes Music" Yes Loitering Project, Urban Omnibus, 2018
loi·ter /ˈloidər/
- : to delay an activity with idle stops and pauses : dawdle
- : to remain in an area for no obvious reason
- | teenagers were loitering in the parking lot
”What is Loitering, Really?” (a visual history) Bloomberg CityLab 🗞️
Bibliography
- Teens & Public Space
- The Yes Loitering Project
- "Yes Sitting, Yes Skating, Yes Music" Yes Loitering Project, Urban Omnibus, 2018
- Activism and Advocacy
- “What is Loitering, Really?” (a visual history) Bloomberg City Lab
- “Youth Activist Toolkit” advocatesforyouth.org
- Spaces/Architecture
- Jan Kattein Architects
- raumlaborberlin
- selgascano
- Centre Pompidou
- The Fun Palace Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood
- Scaffolding Resources
- Seacoast Scaffold, our scaffolding partners
- Materials
- Design for a Fair: The United States Pavilion at Expo '67 Montreal
- The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 12, No. 3, Architecture/Environment (Spring, 1968), pp. 127-134
- The Meanwhile City https://meanwhilecity.milk.sk/
- To dive into visual references & inspiration, see visual gallery from ArchDaily of scaffolding and inflatable projects.
Architecture: Peter Chermayeff, Cambridge Seven Architects, Buckminster Fuller and Associates
Environment & Supergraphics: Ivan Chermayeff
Connect
Jeff Goldenson | jeff@buildingways.com | 617.909.2917
Archive
- ☀️ Solar
- Trees & Nature
- Trees as Infrastructure, Dark Matter Labs
- The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework
