Open Research Office

Lucas Almássy
Roxbury Recreation Center
Fall 2023

 The Roxbury Recreation Center began with an almost unreasonable ambition: to compress housing, recreation, restaurants, libraries, public infrastructure, and an underground Olympic swimming pool into one civic machine. Instead of spreading across the entire site, the project occupies only half the block and builds upward, turning programmatic stacking into the central architectural problem. The building refuses to sit politely beside the park as a sealed institution. It weaponizes its ground floor with restaurants, retail, and public amenities, making the edge of the park dense, active, and hard to ignore. Where many parks fail because they lack daily urban life around them, this project treats the building as an engine for occupation.

The thesis is direct: public space should not be trapped at street level. Ramps, terraces, and elevated routes pull the city upward, transforming the building into a public avenue rather than a private object. Access becomes theatrical. The ascent to the second and third floors is not hidden in a stair core, but staged as a civic experience—visible, generous, and dignified. In this sense, the project shares a lineage with Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia for its radical openness of the ground plan, OMA’s Seattle Public Library for its lifting of the public in and through the building, Rossi for his ability to command a presence in his architecture through its relationship to the urban fabric, and John Hedjuk for his sensitivity towards producing buildings like characters in a story. Here, circulation is not merely movement, but architecture’s social and political substance. The goal is to double, even triple, the amount of public ground by lifting collective life into the building itself.

At the base, the project becomes more primal and tactile. Large prefabricated concrete panels, cast with fabric formwork, give the façade a strange contradiction: mass that appears soft, heavy matter that seems to fold. The concrete unfolds into benches, ledges, thick edges, and climbable surfaces, turning the building’s envelope into an inhabitable public landscape. Restaurant windows become places to sit; deep tapered frames catch oblique sunlight and pull it into the interior. The result is not a recreation center as a box containing activities, but a civic terrain—part building, part street, part park, part stage—where housing, leisure, commerce, and public life are forced into productive collision.