Let’s Take a Meeting…Together
The strong statement behind an artist’s house that fell to earth in Boston
By Carol Schatz Papper

My first thoughts were of Dorothy when I came across this sunflower yellow Quaker-style house askew in the Rose Kennedy Greenway in downtown Boston. Was there a dead Brahmin stuck underneath? Actually, cars were roaring unseen in a buried tunnel below, as the life-enhancing park was grown from land reclaimed from burying the city-severing highway, I-93, during Boston’s legendarily expensive Big Dig.
Brooklyn artist Mark Reigelman created this fourteen-foot high art piece, “The Meeting House,” from traditional building materials like Eastern white cedar and birch plywood to reference both the residential disruption caused by highway infrastructure projects and the healing qualities of communal civic structures. Especially apt, given the art’s location.
Reigelman’s piece made me think not only about infrastructure, but the nature of the Internet. It’s an invisible highway both connecting and cleaving our communities, the way traditional roadways once destroyed and created neighborhoods. It separates us just as much as it brings us together. Office headquarters, supermarkets, book stores, and all type and manner of informal gathering places are falling in its wake.
As work and chores migrate to the web, people seem to feel isolated and adrift, craving places where they can gather and make progress as a community even more. First pay-for-space co-workspaces like The Yard sprang up (when really, couldn’t you work from your bed?), and now unconventional gathering places are responding to that need, from temples of art to temples of fitness.
MoMA’s new renovation, for example, adds 25-percent more public space, including a stunning second floor expresso cafe and first floor lobby lounge. And the stylish newly done first floor of a luxurious Equinox Sports Club New York fuses hotel lobby with high-tech workspace. Gym members give fingers and minds a workout while sitting at a long shared work table with electric outlets, rows of marble cafe tables or on chic and shapely upholstered sofas. You could spend all day at the gym making book without breaking a sweat.
Ironically, at Equinox for example, I’ve seen people using these public work spaces lined up in lonely cafe table rows staring at their glowing screens like toddlers in parallel play, communing without communicating. I call it “isolating in public.” Perhaps if a large Meeting House landed in their midst they would rip off their headphones, put down their screens and talk to each other (which is why I think some people secretly love disasters).
Think about it. When you contrast Reigelman’s colorful small house above with the massive glass skyscrapers in the distance, which one would you rather play in? And if you were Dorothy, which could you make fly?
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