| Summary: | Many of the port cities of North America are built upon ballast stones, discarded by ships after their transit across the Atlantic. Oftentimes, this material was sourced from waste, such as stone offcuts from quarrying, and transported across space and time, slipping through value systems; from waste, to weight, to commodity. In time, structures across the continent boasted chimneys or foundations that had begun their life in the distant granite quarries of Cornwall, and from bricks that had rounded Cape Horn - their material transience obscured by a perceived stability of form.
Buildings are usually seen as the endpoint of material flows, where they remain in intractable, fused assemblies until they reach obsolescence. This familiar pattern is currently playing out in the phased demolition of the Bunker Hill Public Housing Development, the largest affordable housing community on the East Coast. The BHHD can be seen in contrast to the Charlestown Navy Yard, an adjacent shipyard where centuries of investment have established a robust infrastructure of maintenance. We ask: how could the paradigm of the ship, and the creation of material strategies for large, complex assemblages funded by public spending be applied to housing in a resource constrained world?
In The Matter of the Hold, the demolition waste from Bunker Hill is inherited as ballast and transformed, a process made possible by the concept of the “building as hold.”
In light of the increasing shift towards buildings as storehouses of material to be held for future reuse, and as vessels of carbon sequestration, our thesis explores how design for the uneven, yet cyclical ebbs and flows of renewable resources erodes architecture’s traditionally rigid temporal boundaries of planning, construction, and occupancy, and produces temporally dynamic regimes of figure and form. The collection, administration and reconfiguration of waste materials results in the creation of new, regenerative forms of collective living that challenge the boom-and-bust logic of investment in public infrastructures.
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