Sited at 20 Calumet Street, Boston, MA, and situated in Brigham Circle at the convergence of several main intersections in the Mission Hill neighborhood, the site comprises many different conditions: a steep slope, a low-lying commercial edge, and a residential transition.  The programmatic need is to equip a public market, host a green urban room, provide administrative offices, and private accommodations.

The principal component, the ‘folding’ plan, creates spatial voids informing the structure’s programmatic components. The geometry and form of each folding plane are derived contextually. Continuing at the same height, each plane is an abstracted parallel extension of the neighboring structures. These planes fold in and against each other to create an exterior “wrapper.” This is the primary folding tectonic strategy. A secondary folding strategy is implemented at a smaller scale, inside of the primary folds, to give context to the exterior and interior boundaries.