by Nicolas Ayoub, Aarti Dhingra, Claudia Eugenin and Kiley Feickert

Focusing on a concrete high-rise located in Kendall Square of the Massachussett’s Institute of Technology (MIT)’s campus in Cambridge, MA, the third group’s intervention was done with student housing in mind, aiming to create a highly-personalisable, yet private space for shorter-term residents.

Constructed in 1966, the building was declared to have reached the end of its life by 2020, meaning that it would be more profitable to demolish the building so to create greater rental space. As an alternative to this demolition, the third group proposed another reuse option that would better connect the building to the larger context of Boston. Identifying available materials that could be rescued from Boston’s waste output, such as calcium from nearby seafood industries and wood from Hemlock trees, the intervention offered to first strip the internal partition to reveal the structural elements, followed by the creation of external terraces supported by a communal level occupied with supporting trusses. In doing so, the existing grid would be thus perforated to foster connections between neighbours and with nature.

Through this transformation, the third group aimed to involve the community while also reflecting on the concept of extraction—and, namely, what’s reasonable to extract—through the creation of a unique participatory decision-making tool: a board game with which the community would be invited to join in the building process of their homes.

Contents Report - Norman Foster Foundation - Re-materializing Housing Workshop