Pink Flamingo Brewing — Leominster, MA

 ~9,000 SF Brewery, Taproom & Outdoor Gathering Space

Pink Flamingo Brewing is a community gathering place rooted in the culture and history of Leominster — the birthplace of the iconic pink flamingo lawn ornament, designed in 1957 by artist Don Featherstone for the neighboring Union Products factory. The project brings together craft beer production, a welcoming taproom, and a lively outdoor space for live music, bocce, and horseshoes, creating a destination that celebrates the spirit of the surrounding community.

The building’s defining feature is a sawtooth lightweight metal truss roof system, which provides column-free spans well-suited to the scale of brewery equipment while lending the interior a quality of openness and light that a conventional roof could not achieve. The sawtooth form — a series of angled planes alternating between opaque surfaces and north-facing clerestory glazing — delivers consistent, diffuse daylight deep into the production and taproom spaces, reducing reliance on artificial lighting throughout the day. The high-volume interior created by the roof geometry promotes natural stack-effect ventilation, drawing warm air upward and out through operable ridge vents while cooler air is drawn in at the lower perimeter — a passive climate control strategy that is particularly effective in a brewery environment where heat loads from fermentation and brewing equipment are significant. Structurally, the lightweight metal truss system minimizes the building’s overall dead load while achieving the long clear spans the program demands, offering an efficient and cost-effective structural solution.

The roof form was conceived as something more than a functional system. Its overlapping, upswept planes are designed to evoke the layered feathers of a bird in motion — each sawtooth peak rising and separating like plumage, a quiet nod to the flamingo at the heart of the project’s identity. The result is a building that is both purposeful and expressive, grounded in its place and open to its community.