vanishing community room by alsar atelier uses tree stakes and textile canopies for shading

Growing Shade Addresses Urban Inequities and Climate Change

Growing Shade, a project within Cambridge’s ‘Shade is Social Justice’ initiative, aims to address climate change and socioeconomic inequities in densely populated neighborhoods lacking shaded infrastructure. Designed by Alsar-Atelier for Bangladeshi immigrants, this project creates an outdoor community room using oversized tree stakes and lightweight textile canopies to provide shade. The installation, assembled in under a week, adapts to the sun’s path and is seasonal, with the textile removed in fall and winter. As trees mature, they will offer permanent shade, and the temporary structure will be relocated to create a new community space, demonstrating how low-cost, flexible designs can alleviate urban inequities.

Alsar-Atelierr’s Flexible Design utilizes Low-Tech Architecture

Like many urban environments, Cambridge, Massachusetts faces the impacts of climate change and increasing socioeconomic disparities within public spaces. These issues often affect communities in densely populated neighborhoods lacking shaded areas during summer. Growing Shade exemplifies how ephemeral, low-tech, tactical architecture can offer permanent solutions to urban inequities through landscape growth.

The project by architecture and design research studio Alsar-Atelier functions as an outdoor community room with flexible summer use. Built by A1RE, it features a framework that gradually disappears as trees grow. The space consists of columns resembling large tree stakes, arranged in varying densities to optimize shading based on the sun’s path in the northern hemisphere. More columns are placed in the south, with fewer in the north. These columns support a lightweight textile canopy that provides shade while the trees develop. The canopy is easy to assemble and dismantle, removed in fall and winter and reinstalled in spring and summer until the trees can provide shade.

Eventually, the trees will offer permanent shade, and the temporary architecture will move to another site, creating a new shaded community space. With a construction time of less than a week, Growing Shade showcases the potential of transient, low-cost, and adaptable architecture in addressing public realm inequities.

1/8

project info:

name: Growing Shade
architect: Alsar-Atelier | @alsar_atelier

client: City of Cambridge
area: 53 sqm

location: Cambridge, MA

designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.