 Harvard Street Park
The Harvard Street Park is a new one-acre park in the Area IV neighborhood that incorporates existing community gardens and tennis courts into the newly designed recreational space that features a multi-use field, a playground with water sprinklers, new landscaping, and three new public artworks.
Three artists, Laura Evans, Tory Fair, and Kenneth Speiser, have been commissioned by the Cambridge Arts Council’s Public Art Program to create sculptural responses to a standard piece of urban furniture, the tradational park bench. Each artist brings his or her artistic vocabulary and personal vision to an interpretation of the ubiquitous steel park bench and the site of public recreation and gathering.
Examples of Standard Park Benches
Tory Fair is inspired by the playing field markings of competitive sports. The center circle, the corner kick lines, the goal lines, and the field boundaries are all metaphorical markers that define a charged space. For the Harvard Street Park, Fair plays with the markings of a hopscotch court. Transferring the sense of contested ground from the world of sports to the realm of public interaction, Fair’s park bench, a literal site of human conversation and interaction, suggests the “hidden strategies and logic that people bring to their conversations and everyday activities”.
A prepatory sketch for the artistic bench that Laura Evans designed for the park.
(More information on the Harvard Street Park project can be found at Cambridge Community Development Department website.)
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