the monster&machine

An adaptive reuse project sited in Chelsea, MA, transforms an obsolete office park into new housing. We focus on understanding the historical de-densification and scalar shift in this region of Chelsea, which was once primarily residential but now hosts a variety of city infrastructures, industrial, and logistical centers — with far fewer homes. These non-domestic urban features are out of scale with the human and instead serve networks at the regional, national, and global scale. We dub these elements “monsters” because their scalar-mismatch negatively impacts the social and environmental quality of life on site. Our primary strategy to remediate our site and stock relies on de-optimizing the surface area to volume efficiency of the existing buildings through a “hinging” maneuver. Hinging allows us the break up the volumes, aerate the deep plans and sections of our existing stock, and transplant mass toward the center of a site otherwise vast and void. As a conceptual framework for adaptive reuse, the hinge is productive: matter is not destroyed, rather strategically redistributed. The result of our hinging is the transformation of the site from its previous condition of opposing volume and void toward a gentler, internalized continuum;an urban valley attenuated for human habitation amid a host of monsters. with fernando garrido carreras.