This project for a housing block beside a multi-modal transit link in Boston pairs an act of monumental structure with a decidedly civic gesture to speculate on new forms of public-private partnership within the densifying conditions of the contemporary American metropolis. Suspending an immense truss structure from a fourteen-floor residential tower, the proposal suggests that an enclosable public space – afforded beneath the roof in the form of shops, services and transport access – acts as a dependent link between the intimate nature of domestic inhabitation and the otherworldly breadth of infrastructure. In the flow of people, vehicles and energy, the project finds meaningful enmeshment in the confounding mundanity of everyday life. Ultimately, which comes first: a performance or its audience? In extending the ambitions of urban residential development beyond its mere mandate to provide bulk units of housing, the building situates its perspective on the transforming nature of our cities precisely on an embrace of the very contingencies of program, constituency and scale that otherwise render unreachable the very possibility of development itself.

Author:

Connor Gravelle

Rita Wang 

Studio project at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)

Advised by professor Elizabeth Christoforetti

Other works by the author