PAYETTE celebrated the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by holding our fourth annual Day of Service in January. This skills-based service program aims to connect our practice to the wider community and make a positive impact through design excellence.
After receiving proposals in response to the RFP issued in October 2021, we selected three Community Partner organizations whose projects represented a range of scales and typologies, from streetscapes to graphic design. 23 PAYETTE staff volunteered for the Day of Service, drawn from multiple areas of our practice.
PAYETTE staff worked collaboratively with representatives from their partner organization, arranging in-person site visits as well virtual and hybrid working sessions, culminating in the Day of Service charette on January 17th.
On February 3rd we held a hybrid presentation as part of “Thirsty Thursdays,” where each project team presented the results of their project to our wider office. Community Partner Representatives also spoke about their organization’s mission, and their planned next steps for the project after the day of service.
It was a pleasure to see these dedicated teams work together to develop creative solutions for such worthy organizations. We hope to continue supporting our Community Partners in their next steps with these projects and look forward to seeing what the future holds.
A New Day at Trailside: Mass Audubon and Blue Hills Trailside Museum
The Trailside Museum team evaluated the current conditions of the museum and outlined a multi-phase strategy to improve the entry experience, renovate the auditorium and exhibit halls, and increase the visibility of the museum structure to visitors. The team also designed mobile storage and display units that can be easily moved around the museum grounds as needed.
Moving Main Street Forward: The NAMAZING Initiative / North Adams Chamber of Commerce
This team generated concepts for beautifying a stretch of historic Main Street, for use in facilitating dialogue and engagement in community meetings. They developed short, medium and long-term solutions that prioritize pedestrian and bicyclist movement, improve the quality and variety of outdoor spaces, and add needed wayfinding to help direct visitors to the area.
Elevated Thought Creative Center: Elevated Thought
The team provided Elevated Thought with schematic plans and renderings to envision a new anchor institution in a potential building site, imagining flexible spaces that create opportunities for kids to access creative learning opportunities. The scheme proposed renovating a disused library to include a café, meeting spaces, media production labs, art therapy spaces, as well as a gallery and offices.
We are honored to share PAYETTE has received two 2026 Green Good Design Awards from The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies—Land’s Sake Farm and The Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard.
“Green GOOD DESIGN identifies and emphasizes the world’s most important examples of sustainable design and works to develop a public awareness program that informs the general public about which global companies are doing the best job in ecological and sustainable design for our world. Architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning projects, as well as product, packaging, and graphic design projects from over 30 nations were honored with the 2026 Green GOOD DESIGN Award.”
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