Starlight Square, Cambridge
Location: Cambridge, MA
A community project to create a venue for arts and culture as an intervention to the Covid-19 public health crisis. An open-air entertainment complex that kept Central Square culture alive through the pandemic by providing Covid-safe outdoor entertainment, shopping and meeting space.
Starlight Square was built in 2020 as an intervention to the COVID-19 public health crisis. Created by the Central Square Business Improvement District, Flagg Street Studio and Boyes-Watson Architects, Starlight transformed a municipal parking lot for cars into a place for people, providing much needed outdoor space for arts and cultural programming, out-of-school time learning, small business pop-up shops, food distribution, and civic events. In two years, it has hosted over 150 free, public events including the Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School's Senior Prom, the public celebration of life for civil rights icon and Cambridge community member, Dr. Bob Moses, and the City of Cambridge's 41st Inauguration.
Starlight Square 2020
Season Two Opening Day
Project Gallery
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Central Square Business Improvement District (BID)
The BID's work revolves first and foremost around placekeeping. To maintain and uplift what makes Central special, they leverage longstanding, intergenerational relationships to create spaces and opportunities for local residents, artists, and entrepreneurs to benefit from the richness of Central Square's Cultural District. The BID also manages a team of Block-by-Block ambassadors and outreach workers who serve as stewards for the neighborhood.
Flagg Street Studio
Founders Matthew Boyes-Watson and Nina Berg grew up blocks away from each other in Central Square, Cambridge. From urban design and architecture to music and Maradona, they started FLAGG because they wanted the freedom to explore and invest in ideas with the potential to alter the course of the neighborhood for the better.
Boyes-Watson Architects
Boyes-Watson Architects offers a wide spectrum of architectural capability ranging from residential to commercial buildings to interiors and master planning. Their mission is to design for the people who live in or use their buildings and for the enrichment of the locale their buildings inhabit.
Featured Projects
Our ProjectsAlumni Stadium, home of the Boston College Eagles, is a football stadium located on the lower campus of Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, approximately 6 miles west of downtown Boston. The stadium was built in 1957 and has seating for 44,500 fans.
Our ProjectsA NY style heavy duty overhead protection walkway structure for the MIT SoMa project. The SoMa Project includes over 100,000 square feet of new or repositioned ground floor retail and more than two acres of new publicly accessible and porous open space that will be added to the eight acres currently existing.
Our ProjectsInnovative pharmaceutical giant Novartis is expanding near MIT, a project that will encourage partnered ventures and enliven this life sciences gateway with a fresh infusion of green space and retail businesses.