The Boston Conservatory Marquee

Utile and Handel Architects, 2014. The Boston Conservatory’s new studio building, located just down the street from Fenway Park, sits at a corner where Ipswich Street turns from running diagonally to running west to east parallel to the Mass Pike. The neighborhood surrounding the studio building is home to many large signs and billboards. Because of this, the marquee for the new studio building needed to be prominent enough to not get lost in the array of existing signs while responding to the small scale of the building. The marquee features white, illuminated text, oriented vertically on a royal blue field. The wedge-shaped design allows motorists speeding by on the pike to read the sign as they approach, and by pulling the sign away from the building, the marquee is positioned so that pedestrians traveling to the studio building from the west, south, and east can easily identify the building.