16 Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025 No Whiteboards, No Post-its Building relationships between communities and their local natural ecosystems is our collective mandate as designers in the twenty-first century. This reflection on the first ten years of our practice — ARCADE — organizes our process for doing this work into a format that invites modification and expansion by other designers for their own local communities. We founded our office in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a post-industrial city of approximately 40,000 people in the Northern Forests ecological region that spans the border between the United States and Canada. We are trained as architects, and returned to our home region early in our careers when we received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to start an experimental architecture-andpoetry project called The Mastheads as a way of reviving local heritage in a community facing economic, social, and environmental challenges after the departure of its manufacturing base in the 1980s. We are not trained as landscape FEATURE Tessa Kelly and Chris Parkinson, lead ARCADE (arc-ade.org), a community-driven design practice based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and Troy, New York, whose work interweaves architecture, landscape, urbanism, research, happenings, and art. Design Engagement in Nature Tessa Kelly and Chris Parkinson
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==