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Metropolis Next Generation Winner
By Alex Marshall
June 2004
At a ceremony May 6 in Boston, Metropolis named Single Speed
Design as the winner of the magazine's first Next Generation Design
Prize. In front of their peers and colleagues, the members of the
architecture firm—John Hong, Erik Carlson, and Jinhee Park, along with
their collaborator, developer Paul Pedini—were honored for their
proposal to transform remnants from the Big Dig, Boston’s $15
billion public works project, into beautiful, sustainable housing. Their
story follows.
As a freeway expands, it gulps space, gobbling up town and country. But
an elevated freeway—disassembled—is surprisingly compact. Here
in this salvage yard outside Boston, one particular former freeway lies
in neat piles. There are stacks of steel “piers,” the
26-foot-long support columns that once held up the elevated roadbed; and
slightly contoured, 8-inch-thick prefabricated reinforced-concrete
panels, called “inverset panels,” which were placed on top of
the piers creating the highway. There are also other miscellaneous
materials lying about, such as precast concrete tubes—used to
reroute traffic—placed in tidy rows.
“It’s like the highway has been tamed,” says John Hong,
principal of Single Speed Design (SsD) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as
he stands and looks over the yard full of debris. What the firm and
their collaborator Paul Pedini would like to do is put the freeway back
together again—as apartment buildings or perhaps public
housing.
For this bold plan SsD has won Metropolis’s first Next Generation
Design Prize, capturing the award out of more than 200 entries. The
competition brief asked for a “big idea” encompassing
sustainability, universal access, and beauty; it also requested a
business plan detailing how the winner would use the $10,000 award as
seed money to further develop the concept. SsD’s scheme beat out 17
finalists whose ideas—breathtaking in their range and
originality—included a “soft house,” a portable swimming
pool, solar-power collectors, a waterfront redevelopment plan, and a
better chair design. The annual competition seeks to blur the lines
between industrial design, architecture, interior design, and
planning.
The pieces of freeway in question come from the infamous Big Dig in
Boston. At about $15 billion, it is the largest transportation project
in the country. For the past 12 years, workers have been tunneling
beneath the Central Artery, which was cut through the middle of the city
in the 1950s. Last year, when the first part of the tunnel opened, they
began removing a stretch of the elevated highway.
Modern Continental Construction of Cambridge, a firm specializing in
heavy infrastructure work, is doing a large part of the job. Pedini, a
vice president supervising the firm’s Big Dig work, had the
inspiration of using some of this mountain of materials to make a
building. “We were having a meeting about disassembling these
temporary bridges,” says Pedini, a 48-year-old civil engineer and
Boston native. “They turned to us and said, ‘Let’s break
them up and throw them away.’ This didn’t make much sense to
me. These are fantastic materials. I said to them, ‘Do you mind if
I grab them?’ Then I jokingly said, ‘Maybe I’ll build a
house out of them,’ and they all laughed. But it got me
thinking.”
Thus began the seeds of collaboration between Pedini and SsD. Although
he had offhandedly mentioned a house, Pedini had at that point only the
vaguest of ideas. He went looking for architects who could help him
figure it out. While jogging one day in Cambridge he came across
SsD’s Valentine Houses, a three-unit apartment building whose clean
contemporary lines stood out amid tradition-bound Cambridge. “I
thought it was the prettiest house in town,” Pedini says. He
e-mailed the company on the sign, which happened to reside next door in
a low-slung building that once housed a Model-T engine factory. Pedini
asked two other architecture firms to come up with plans as well, but
gradually dropped them as he bonded with SsD.
The firm Pedini clicked with is young and small. Its four members are
all in their early- to mid-thirties. Hong, who grew up in McLean,
Virginia, assembled the firm out of family and friends. It includes his
wife, Jinhee Park, a native of Korea who like Hong is a graduate of
Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; his brother Andy, an MIT Media
Lab alum; and Erik Carlson, the firm’s project manager, who has
been close friends with John since they met on their first day as
undergraduates at the University of Virginia. Besides the architecture
firm, the building includes a professional music studio that Andy runs,
which gives the design studio a vaguely rock-and-roll ambience. During a
conversation in SsD’s central meeting room, a battered 12-string
Gibson leaned against one wall.
The process for what would eventually be called the Big Dig buildings
began in late spring 2002 when Pedini and John Hong walked a section of
I-93 called Leverett Circle, a kind of no-man’s-land crisscrossed
by train tracks and encircled by off-ramps. The materials for the
project are coming from a curving freeway off-ramp here, erected to
handle traffic during the construction. When they first visited
together, it had just been taken down. As they examined the debris,
Pedini educated Hong about the material possibilities, and Hong educated
Pedini about the design possibilities.
“I would ask Paul, ‘Can you cantilever this beam out twenty
feet?’” Hong remembers. “And he would say, ‘No, but
you can cantilever it seventeen feet.’ It was a fun process.”
If there is an ideal relationship between architects and a structural
engineer, this is it. Given Pedini’s background and interests, it
is not surprising. A painter and sculptor, he still talks with regret
about his decision not to study architecture. He is married to a painter
from Barcelona, whom he says converted him from “a Gambrel-loving
shingle guy to a steel-and-glass guy.” In working with SsD, Pedini
communicated to them his love of the heavy steel and concrete of bridges
and freeways. “To him the aesthetics of these materials is inherent
in what they can do, so we were always trying to maintain that,”
Hong says.
As SsD collaborated with Pedini, a creative process emerged. Often Hong
came up with the basic concepts, Park refined the designs, and Carlson
researched materials and systems. “I would do the broad strokes,
Jinhee would make it look good, and Erik would make it work,” Hong
says. “That’s typical with a lot of our projects.”
As the design progressed, their attention focused increasingly on the
idea of an apartment building. Pedini began looking for a site. He found
one—a prominent triangular lot shaped like the prow of a ship on
Massachusetts Avenue, a central thoroughfare in Cambridge that leads
into Boston. For this property SsD designed the two “Big Dig”
apartment buildings that were the principal focus of the Metropolis
competition entry. The larger building runs along the avenue, and has 14
condominiums and a café at the pointed apex of the lot. Because
the smaller building faced a different street and had single-family
zoning, it consists of four townhouses. An underground parking lot with
23 spaces serves both buildings.
What’s so startling about the design is that it doesn’t merely
incorporate materials from the freeway but essentially reconstructs it
using the roadbed as the roof of the main apartment building. The steel
columns that once held up the road are now holding up floors. The floors
are made of inverset concrete panels from another former road bed. The
entire building curves in the same arc as the original freeway off-ramp.
Other materials from the Big Dig—such as marine-grade plywood used
for concrete molding and ancient timber beams dug up from the bottom of
the harbor—are used for cladding. Pre-cast concrete panels are
placed at off angles on the facade of the buildings to create balconies
and dramatic living spaces.
According to Hong, the major conceptual breakthrough came one day when
he stopped “resisting” the idea of copying the core
construction techniques and form of the elevated freeway, which they
called “the bridge”: “Paul gave us the original working
drawings of the bridge. I was looking at it, and all of a sudden it
looked like a building to me. And I said to myself, ‘Why am I
resisting this? Why not just use the existing technology?’ We were
trying to resist just putting the bridge back up. And the more we
resisted, the more technical hurdles came up. Finally we just accepted
it.”
Ironically this concession is probably what makes the concept viable.
Building (or rebuilding) freeways is something large construction
companies know about. “For infrastructure guys, this would be so
easy,” Hong says. “This is one-tenth of what they do in a day.
They are expensive to hire on a per-day basis, but they will work very
quickly.” SsD estimates that it would take a trained crew only 14
days to erect and frame the 30,000-square-foot apartment buildings,
versus two months for conventional buildings. The combination of quick
assembly and salvaged materials make the cost substantially below a
standard building.
Since the National Defense and Interstate Highway Act of 1956, federal
highways and bridges have all been required to be strong enough to carry
military vehicles. So the Big Dig buildings would literally be robust
enough to drive a tank on (or more practically, put a swimming pool on
top of). Carlson says it’s the stretching and breaking of
conventional boundaries that make the project so exciting.
“It’s about more than just architecture and the Big Dig,”
he says. “It’s about how we approach the labor force and
economy. It’s a conceptual shift, using perfectly good materials in
another realm than what they were intended for.”
But will these buildings be constructed? Like most real estate ventures,
it depends in large part on factors that Pedini and SsD have little
control of. They are negotiating with the owner of the property and have
begun what promises to be an arduous community-review process. Somewhat
predictably, the largest hurdles are not technical but cultural.
Cambridge, ultraliberal politically, is extremely conservative
aesthetically. Getting the Big Dig apartment buildings through the
design-review process will be tough. “The more real this project
got, the more resistance we got from people about how it looked,”
Hong says. “People our age were incredibly excited, saying,
‘Man, you have to do this.’ But it’s a very challenging
design to others. We had a meeting with a developer from New York who
liked it but asked us to clad it in brick.”
As negotiations for the apartment buildings slowly proceeded, the team
began a second project almost as an afterthought—a high-end home
for Pedini, which uses the same materials and techniques as the Big Dig
structures. It is now under construction in a neighborhood called Six
Moon Hill, in Lexington, which was founded by the Architects
Collaborative with Walter Gropius, head of the Bauhaus and dean of
Harvard’s Design School during and after World War II. In this
small subdivision home builders are actually required to construct
Modern homes. But even there Pedini and SsD felt pressure to make their
design tamer to win approval. “It was, ‘No exposed structure;
it can’t look like a bridge; it has to be sober,’” Hong
says. They would have accepted a home on stilts or pilotes à la
Corbusier, he adds, but visible steel highway girders were
resisted.
While its projects continue in the Boston area, SsD is exploring the
idea of exporting the highway concept. Park recently returned from
Seoul, where the city is also taking down an urban freeway put up a few
decades ago. She hopes to convince officials there to plan in advance
for reuse of the highway materials. And Pedini wants to interest state
officials in building public housing in Boston from other Big Dig
materials.
Despite these ambitious plans, it’s still too early to tell how far
the concept can travel. But they have already proven a lot in Boston and
aim to prove even more by using the prize money to respond to an RFP as
a way of testing the concept’s economic viability. Often design
competitions award prizes to fantastical ideas that have little chance
of getting realized. Here a prize has been awarded to a fantastical idea
that is very real. This is no idle daydream. |
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1ST ANNUAL AWARD
To jump-start entrepreneurial design projects, the Metropolis Next
Generation Prize grants $10,000 to a designer or architect whose Big
Idea endeavors to improve the designed environment—making it more
sustainable, accessible, technologically advanced, and beautiful. |
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THE SITE
The winning team of the Metropolis Next Generation Design
Prize—(front, from left to right) architects Erik Carlson, John
Hong, and Jinhee Park of Single Speed Design and (in the background)
Paul Pedini, the developer they are collaborating with—stand among
dismantled sections of Interstate 93 at Leverett Circle in Boston.
Portrait by John Goodman for Metropolis |
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THE IDEA
The team proposes relocating and recycling mounds of excess materials
from Boston’s Big Dig, specifically the disassembled sections of
I-93 (above), which they hope to reassemble into housing for a
site in Cambridge, Massachusetts (below). |
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CONFIGURATIONS
The steel frame and concrete inversets have the potential to be
assembled into multiple schemes for a variety of building types. (A):
the four-story multi-unit building they are planning for Cambridge would
fit between a park and pedestrian path on one side and a commercial
thoroughfare on the other. Other possible configurations include: (B) a
mid-rise block; (C) a curved single-width slab building; (D) a townhouse
complex; (E) a double width slab structure; (F) cluster buildings; and
(G) detached buildings. |
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CONSTRUCTION
Starting (1) with a partially excavated site and perimeter wall a
construction crew (2) pours the bearing walls and column footings; (3)
lays the box-beams that form the underground garage; (4) erects rough
steel frames; (5) welds inverset floor panels in place; (6) installs
vertical circulation and a stepped-back roof; and (7) clads the
structure with recycled glass and old-growth wood. |
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Unlike standard floor planes, recycled long-span inversets allow for up
to 16 foot cantilevers. Balconies and gardens extend beyond typical
interior and exterior boundaries (above), and on the exterior inversets
shift to form a discontinuous facade (below). |
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LOADS
Though standard frame structures typically withstand 40 to 50 pounds per
square foot, inverset panels from Interstate-93 are enormously strong.
Capable of withstanding up to 250 pounds per square foot, they would
allow for the placement of large rocks, swimming pools, and even trees
on top of them (above). The interior courtyard of the proposed housing
development for Cambridge (below) will be built on recycled
box-beams that will hold planter beds and water channels. |
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Objects too massive for typical residences, such as a large aquarium, a
pool table, a piano, and library stacks, can be placed inside
the Big Dig dwelling. |
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An elevation demonstrates the circulation of air through
stairwells and the pattern of recycled colored glass on the ground floor
facade. |
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Additional renderings show a night-time view from the main street
(left) and a daytime view from the adjacent park (right).
Images courtesy Single Speed Design |
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