API Thinking

Architects are increasingly asked to grapple with large problems on impossibly short time lines. If modernism was typified by experiments in modularity to address this new scale of work, this project seeks to open a contemporary possibility that retains the efficiency of modular thinking without rote repetition: the beauty of the API is that it allows systematized adjustment, alteration, and adaptation but eschews standardized solutions.

Faced with the need to propose a way of occupying a mile long site in downtown Boston, this project was designed as an urban housing API. Rather than a precious building, the final product is a malleable prototype that may vary in response to changes in the urban fabric along the length of this vast site. By building into the DNA of the housing block the idea of flexible 'knuckles,' the building may snake its way along the site without effecting its viability. The corners, typically a difficult design moment, are here rendered as an essential and active component in the API. The knuckles operate as a compact punctuation of the building by bundling vertical circulation, communal spaces, and egress.

The building thus functions as a kind of API that may be used by the architect to interface with urban planners, neighborhood groups, developers, and other designers in an effort to negotiate the best urban disposition and unit configuration. Both the siting and the composition of unit types are highly flexible in the design phase without requiring extensive redrawing. The possibility space is illustrated here in diagrams and models that were used in the development of the project.