Public Works, Unsolicited Small Projects for the Big Dig

Boston's Big Dig was the most expensive urban public work in U.S. history. The city's elevated six-lane highway, called the Central Artery, and the two tunnels under Boston Harbor, were some of the most congested, accident-prone motorways in the United States. The city's solution, nicknamed The Big Dig, was to replace the elevated highway with a series of eight-to-ten-lane underground expressways. Public Works presents a series of 14 disarmingly modest, speculative interventions by the Boston-based MY Studio, a multidisciplinary design firm operating in the space between architecture, art and landscape. Collectively, these interventions expose, connect and reconfigure the relationship between the underground expressways and the new parks that emerged in the Big Dig's wake, demonstrating the effect design can have on our conception of public space.