4.646 The Building Site (An Experimental History), SP22

Collaborators: Inge Donovan, Paul Gruber, Emily Wisseman, Calvin Zhong

MIT SA+P, Instructor: Timothy Hyde

Project Brief: 

The Boston Custom House was built from 1837 to 1849, choreographing shipping routes, quarry work, railway lines, timber felling, hands wielding tools and labour routines.

In 1911, construction for the Custom House tower began, and the building itself became a construction site. In this recurrence of building site, latent conditions re-emerged: stones had to be quarried and brought to the site, marble was polished, labour rights were fought and won, tools were wielded and parts were once more assembled.

Double Sited is a framework for shifting our imagination of historical objects away from the final form of the object and toward an understanding of its means: the twinned drawings center around an object that persisted through both sites.

These historical reconstructions blur the boundary between the sites, resisting an episodic or centralized understanding of the building site. Independently, each layer describes a re-emergent condition of labour, material, tools, or costs, and by the end, the layers are codependent, demonstrating many interdependencies and convergences of the building site.