The design for the Chrysanthemum Building in Boston, MA, USA offers a viable solution to the “housing question” – promoting an affordable model for residential development in a dense urban neighborhood. The ten apartments include four micro-units and six adaptable family lofts. The structure, a wooden construction with a layered metal screen, takes its identity from its immediate surroundings through set-back terraces, the transformation of wrought iron fire escapes into digitally fabricated shading elements, and a commercial space at street level. The proposal integrates mobile phone applications for bike sharing and building-systems monitoring and promotes the use of social media to enhance user participation and communication.

The Chrysanthemum Building creates an affordable, sustainable new model for residential development in a dense urban infill site. The project includes ten units (four compact units and six adaptable family units). The building uses a mobile app and social media networks integrated with efficient building systems to create a user culture that supports local sustainable services.

The North End of Boston is characterized by it narrow streets and alley ways, its brick buildings and cascading fire escapes, and its social fabric. The Chrysanthemum Building takes its identity from its set-back terraced façade, the transformation of wrought iron fire escapes into a digitally designed and fabricated screen wall, and a commercial space that spills out onto the street reinforcing the neighborhoods street-life. The carved-out rear courtyard underscores the project’s motivation to create spaces that benefit from natural light and promote a state of well-being and permanence.

The Chrysanthemum Building extrapolates the idea that city living can promote new urban ecologies. The project promotes a “common sense culture” of building-related communication networks, domestic farm-to-table slow-food production, and embraces a car-free lifestyle that mines alternative forms of transportation such as subway, bus, and ferry. Each unit is provided with a bicycle, storage, and bike share mobile app. From the project’s carbon sequestering wood construction, its large windows that distribute natural daylight, and high-efficiency infrastructural systems that anticipate the region’s growth in wind-energy, the Chrysanthemum Building creates a model for environmentally responsible urban development.

The Chrysanthemum Building is financed according to the principle that short-term investments must not prevent long-term opportunities for responsible energy conservation and adaptability to changing urban lifestyles. The demands and constraints of a small urban site required working with neighborhood associations and the city’s redevelopment authority to reconsider zoning ordinances which would have resulted in parking at the street in lieu of commercial activities that characterize the neighborhood. The limited dimensions of the site required an alternative to steel and concrete construction resulting in a “softer wood frame” construction adaptable to the urban context and providing opportunities for local contractors to participate in the local economy.