Trustees of Reservations  Concord, Massachusetts

The Trustees of Reservations is a non-profit conservation group that owns, operates, and conserves over a hundred properties across Massachusetts. One such property is the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts. The Manse is famous for a number of reasons. It sits just several hundred feet from the North Bridge, where some of the first shots of the American Revolution were fired in 1775. Famed philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandfather lived in the home at the time of the battle, and over the coming decades it would welcome many other great American minds, including Thoreau, Channing, Fuller and Hawthorne (who would etch poems into the windows with a diamond while living at the house with his new bride Sophia). The Trustees hired ObjectIDEA to conduct the interpretive planning and early design stages of a proposed new visitor center on the site.