Monsters & Hinges
Housing adaptive reuse development in Chelsea, MA, USA
In collaboration with Paris Bezanis
An adaptive reuse project based in Chelsea, MA. Four obsolete office buildings in a site sorrounded by logistical infrastructure and large scale warehouses are transformed into affordable housing.
The project starts with a thorough analysis of the site. A series of large scale, opaque and extremely efficient buildings (defined as monsters) are found near the site. These monsters are key to understand the site and drive the project.
In fact, a series of hinging operations, involving a very rigorous conservation of mass, deem neccesary in order to demonsterize our existing buildings and to transform them into habitable housing. The operations results in a de-optimizationof volume to surface ratio of the previous existing office buildings.
By transforming the site through these hinging operations and engaging with human-scaled measures and modes ofindexing, we rehabilitate the monsters of 70-100 everett ave, Chelsea, MA away from an opaque and hermetic collectionof horizontal buildings into an urban sanctuary attenuated to the needs of both human and collective operations.
Supervisor: Andrew Holder
An adaptive reuse project based in Chelsea, MA. Four obsolete office buildings in a site sorrounded by logistical infrastructure and large scale warehouses are transformed into affordable housing.
The project starts with a thorough analysis of the site. A series of large scale, opaque and extremely efficient buildings (defined as monsters) are found near the site. These monsters are key to understand the site and drive the project.
In fact, a series of hinging operations, involving a very rigorous conservation of mass, deem neccesary in order to demonsterize our existing buildings and to transform them into habitable housing. The operations results in a de-optimizationof volume to surface ratio of the previous existing office buildings.
By transforming the site through these hinging operations and engaging with human-scaled measures and modes ofindexing, we rehabilitate the monsters of 70-100 everett ave, Chelsea, MA away from an opaque and hermetic collectionof horizontal buildings into an urban sanctuary attenuated to the needs of both human and collective operations.
GSD Harvard | 2023