Greater Boston Food Bank – a work of art from near and afar

By Matt Haviland

Few buildings are as much fun from the outside as the Greater Boston Food Bank. Officially known as the Yawkey Distribution Center, this structure is described by Robert Campbell as a “billboard,” and employs a magic optical trick that you might see.

Since it is a food bank, you wouldn’t think architecture was much of a focus. Said the designer, Tom Sieniewicz, “every dollar you save is two meals.” But that didn’t keep him from creating what Campbell referred to as a “gem.” This “architectural message board” of a building has some of the coolest concepts, both practical and industrially artistic, that I’ve ever heard of. The building façade is dull gray with “The Greater Boston Food Bank” written in big red letters like, yes, a billboard, and 596 strange “wedge shaped markers” that stick out the front. This seemingly random feature is actually a hidden message – if you look at the building at the exact right moment on south 93, all of the red markers converge into the image of a wheat plant, which is the company’s logo.

The creativity and obscure messages don’t stop outside. When visitors arrive, they are first taken around a catwalk positioned high up in this building which is, at its most basic, a warehouse. It is skylit, you can see the literal tons of food, and according to Robert Campbell, makes “you feel like you’re on parade.” The presentation itself is full of exposed steel framing, going to no lengths to disguise the fact that this is still just an area for food to be shipped. However, Campbell notes how natural light pours in through the white polystyrene paneled walls, so that “occasional bright colors play against the steel.”

As for the symbolic, artistic side of things, there’s a “rough black circle with a cross in it” carved into the concrete floor. People see this upon entering, and its meaning goes way back to the Great Depression, where the homeless people would leave a similar symbol in scratched coal outside houses where they were well-treated and fed. Since the food bank is a virtual macrocosm of those good Samaritans, they have the right to stamp that old symbol where everyone can see it. What’s extraordinary is that they had the artistic intent to do so.

About concerns of whether the design, with its hidden pictures and obvious lettering, would be a dangerous distraction to drivers, Campbell mused that “viewing a screen” is nearly the same thing as “counting cows.” Since cows probably won’t be outlawed anytime soon, this building probably won’t face the legal ramifications that forbade WGBH to hang an electric screen over the turnpike in Brighton a few years ago. Hidden messages are only there for a fraction of a second, so that’s the exact amount of time they could remain a distraction. Thus, even though the Food Bank was also turned down for having an electric message board over I-93, they creatively worked around it.

“The highest calling of an architect is to help the community,” said Sieniewicz. Robert Campbell thinks that he might sound a little old-fashioned saying that, but completely agrees with the man’s methods. In fact, he notes that it was a tough job designing this building without “descending into Vegas-like kitsch” or making it a “giant TV,” like many of the newer works in Times Square. Campbell doesn’t consider that architecture at all, but he calls this “a great achievement,” and knowing that 30 million pounds of food filter through The Greater Boston Food Bank every year, feeding 83,000 mouths a week through nearly 700 agencies, this privately owned (but state and city-helped) charity is not only a feat of architecture but a testament to human compassion. It deserves to show its message to the world, even if part of that message can only be seen in split-second bursts.