Growing

Completed with Alana Rogers
for Paxton Sheldahl’s Comprehensive Design Studio

Every Friday and Saturday through the Spring and Summer, an outdoor farmer’s market sets up at the Haymarket site. We wanted to amplify this unique characteristic by minimizing the building’s footprint to allow for the most public space. We wanted Haymarket to expand onto the site, whether for merchants selling goods or for happy patrons to enjoy their purchases. This meant having a planting strategy with vegetation that offers a different attractive quality throughout every season. Doing so also provides food for insects and birds which encourages biodiversity along the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

The site plan includes a large gathering space oriented towards the North End, to allow people to stop within the side instead of traversing right through it. Permeable pavers allow the hardscape to continue contributing towards our water retention goals. The maintenance entrance is hidden within a dense planting group towards the more congested south end of the site to mitigate sound, noise, and smell from the garbage disposal and sanitation, which allows the open spaces to embrace passersby with ease. The landscape is used as a biofiltration rain garden which absorbs a larger percentage of the building’s water runoff, which does not put as much strain the city’s storm drains.

This project builds on the structural properties of triply periodic minimal surfaces. TPMS are family of geometry found naturally as biological membranes, block copolymers, and within the eye rods of the Tree Shrew. The self-supporting, double-curving, and characteristically repeating geometries have been used today as 3D printing infill pathing, superconductor design, and for architectural imagination. Using 3D printed pre-fabricated modules of the Schoen-IWP variant, the tower pieces get delivered to the site and stacked on top of themselves, as a fast, cheap, and resource-efficient way to construct a new building. Manipulations of the tower’s façade allow the building to express different zones of the tower itself, breaking up the typical monotony of a tower typology.

We integrate mechanical systems into the permanent elements of the structure, intentionally redundant for ease of maintenance and upgrade but also to supplement changing uses throughout the day and years alike. Two VAV systems per floor plate allows for different uses / environmental conditions to exist adjacent to each other. Easy-to-access mechanical spaces above each bathroom as well in addition to a dedicated floor, allow for upgrades to occur as MEP products also advance. Water channeled through the landscape below acts as a filtering agent for the greywater used in our tower. While active systems may be some of the most familiar parts of a building, we also deployed passive heating and cooling strategies as part of the tower’s geometry. It’s sculptural form allows for deeper penetration of light, reduced wind load, summer sun shading, and winter sun maximization.

0: Public & Market 1-5: Daycare 6-7: Nightclub 8-10: Urban Agriculture
11: Mechanical 12-17: Co-working Space 18-24: Residential

We sought to make a human hive, an adaptable structure that could accomodate for unpredicatable futures with flexible interior spaces. Our floor plans, while filled with furniture to satisfy current uses, are designed to be customized and adapted to whatever needs may arise. We imagined theoretical uses such as intimacy rehabilitation, emotional re-immersion, a people farm, and a community center that extends Haymarket’s use, as scenarios to guide our design methodologies to keep the building flexible for the future.

‘Beginning’ and ‘ending’ are human constructed concepts derived from our limited capability to experience just a fragment of time in a single life. The reality is that time and space do not obey arbitrarily imposed logicistics in an attempt to feign order onto systems humans want to control without knowing fully how they operate. What it means to be a human, what it means to be an architecture, and what it means to live in this world will continue to change, and it is the responsiblity of designers to create the most ecologically minded, socially oriented, and accessible public spaces as possible.