Marginal Street Lofts 3.0

• location:
  East Boston, MA
• Date:
  Completed 2019
• client:
  Air Safe Contracting
• collaborators:
  MEP Engineer: Zade Associates LLC
  Structural Engineer: Gregorian Engineers
  Photographer: John Horner Photography
• project_team:
  Principal-In-Charge: Elizabeth Whittaker
  Project Architect: Seth Hoffman
  Design Team: Chris Johnson, Peter Sprowls
• description:
  298 Marginal Street is Merge Architects’ third multi-family building on this harbor facing street in East Boston. The site is long, flanked on two sides by the local vernacular triple deckers. The narrow street frontage faces due South but sits within the FEMA flood plane extending up from the Boston Harbor. The design for this residential building negotiates challenging site constraints to provide a complex mix of seven units that maximized three different unit typologies: the duplex, flat, and townhouse. Each unit is provided its own unique exterior space with views to the Harbor, and in the case of the townhouse types at the back of the building, a landscaped backyard.
  
  Two duplex units face the street. These stand on pilote over covered onsite parking. Each of these units have graciously sized glazed doors onto South facing balconies. The angular facade binds together the two units formally but orients them in slightly different directions. This sculptural gesture cuts off views from one deck to the other maintaining a sense of privacy despite their proximity.
  
  Halfway back into the site, the middle portion of the building houses two flats, oriented across the width of the building. These are carefully calibrated in the plan such that their windows bypass abutting structures and take advantage of borrowed views into a mix of foliated back yards and mid-block open space. By incrementally shifting the building in plan as the site broadens towards the rear, the small sun balconies off of the flats’ bedrooms are able to steal slot views back toward the Harbor.
  
  The property advantageously slopes up and away from the water. As the rear half of the site is above the floodplain, three-story townhouses cap the end of the building, each with individual entries at grade. The first floor mud rooms and storage spaces provide individual addresses, added space and privacy, and are floor-through, opening onto a private backyard under multi-story balconies.
  
  The building is tied together by a consistent use of dark bronze toned corrugated steel. Window surrounds, entry areas, doors and and decks are punctuated by rich brown cedar which adds warmth to the steel. The metal siding is conceptualized as a wrapper - its inherent ability to bend in plan was a trigger to explore the curved and scalloped forms of the project. The vertical ribs of the corrugation create a pattern of shadow that visually accentuates the curved forms. The shape, texture, and materials of Marginal 3.0 poetically mirror the disparate elements of the site: the steel of the industrial shipyard structures to the West, the texture of the clapboard on East Boston’s triple deckers, and the curvatures found throughout the shapes of the barges and sailboats that step away into the Harbor.