Taylor Davis
Russell Field
Artist Taylor Davis created a sculptural bus shelter at Russell Field in North Cambridge, a recreational park that received extensive recent renovations. Improvements to the park include a new field house, renovations to the baseball, football, and soccer fields, a new tot lot, and new lighting and landscaping.
At the entrance to the park, Davis's design of the bus shelter brings her artistic vision to a utilitarian structure in a busy urban site. Her choice of materials and sculptural forms reference the past and present uses of the Park. The shelter sits on the edge of a small body of water ("Jerry's Pit") that once was a clay pit for the local nineteenth-century brickmaking industry. Later it became a swimming hole and eventually an industrial site and environmental blemish.
Davis's rose-tinted glass panels forming the walls of the bus shelter make a reference to our desire to see beauty where there is blight. Rose-colored panes are punctuated by clear panels, and as one moves in and out of the structure, our view of our surroundings, through carefully callibrated spaces, makes subtle shifts. The wood bench extends beyond the perimeter of the shelter, evoking the length of a baseball dugout and the activity of waiting, shared by baseball player and bus rider alike. The shelter has extra height and encourages an upward glance, where the rose of the glass, the blue of the sky, and the tips of the nearby trees share one's frame of vision.
:: Download photos of the Russell Field Bus Shelter.
For more information on Russell Field improvements, visit
www.cambridgema.gov/cdd/cp/parks/russell/index.html.
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