Lilly Saniel-Banrey

Designer of many things. Sowing joy and wellbeing into the details of everyday life. Currently at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. See a full scope of work including architecture, graphics, objects, and documents. Or just see my current projects.

People’s Palace for Charlestown


 Proposed 2022
Charlestown, MA

Harvard Graduate School of Design
Studio by Angela Pang

 The People’s Palace is a historically loaded, often utopic vision of the space of public gathering. Packed with endless program, one could spend all day, all year even, immersed in its treasures. Perfect for “people watching”, too. In turn, the People’s Palace often choreographs telling relationships between viewer and viewed, often conflating leisure with voyuerism. This People’s Palace for Charlestown offers the solitude of a focused activity with the unity of a monument, toppling the existing contours of the viewer-viewed relationship of the typology. Community amenities are gathered and stacked into the tower, a new world on each floor. Simulatenously, floor-to-floor blocks are slightly shifted and tilted and and exterior skin is held from the face of each floor creating a winding full-tower secondary circulation system. This exterior circuit offers a different embodiment of the monument of the tower, offering the occupant multiple vantage points of the city as they scale to the top. Up into the sky, this tower is both an experiment of congealing city into building and building into city, rocking both established visions of monument and scale while calling upon the individuals who make the city what it really ought to be.



The Bunker Hill Monument is iconic as an obelisk and a symbol of unity in the Charlestown neighborhood. The new vision of the obelisk resembles unity but recognizes the many. This people’s palace takes on the height and stature of the Monument while inviting the community into and up through it, confidently owning height and notoriety.


A tower reachs into the sky, shifting and rotating slightly with each floor. Circulation hugs a shifting facade, weaving in and out of program at each floor.