UMass ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION
In the gallery at the Olver Design Building at UMass
Exhibition: Cities of Now | Cities of Tomorrow
October 28 – December 18, 2025
What would sustainable, affordable, and livable cities of the future look like? Living in cities presents challenges to those who have limited means. Providing affordable housing, by building new units and updating existing ones, is most critical when the future of cities is considered. Our project seeks to demonstrate how adapting existing affordable housing can lead to a built environment in which wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, microforests, and water/wastewater resilience strategies are integrated within the fabric of the city.
By focusing on affordable housing, we ask, What if existing projects do more than just house people, by generating their own energy, managing their own stormwater and wastewater, making neighborhoods greener, healthier, and cooler? We envision such a future by creating an evidence-based case study with visual and scientific data to help cities and communities make such futures possible in urban areas of different scales and configurations.
We focused our attention on the Rindge Tower Complex, a project that has more than 600 residential units distributed in three high-rise towers, located in North Cambridge, Mass. This site has high housing density, is located on the edge of a busy road, is primarily paved with impervious surfaces, has poor tree canopy coverage, is subjected to possible flooding, and is long overdue for repair and adaptation. By planting microforests in place of barren ground and asphalt and deploying small-scale wind and solar energy in existing communities, we imagine that cities of tomorrow can be healthier, more resilient, and self-sufficient.
The show will be on until mid-December, and the Gallery is open during regular hours from 9-5.
This project is supported by a Provost Interdisciplinary Grant.
