Melissa Jacobs Architecture Portfolio 2023

2019-2022

MELISSA JACOBS ARCHITECTURE PORTFOLIO

URBAN REDEVELOPMENT HOUSING LIBRARY

children’s museum seaport mall

seaport world trade center

ica leader bank pavilion

convention center design center

site

power plant

medal of honor park

tynan community center

catholic academy/church

dorchester heights

j f condon school

bigelow school

URBAN REDEVELOPMENT

South Boston currently sits at the intersection of multiple encroaching - and contrasting - programmatic neighborhoods. With its historic neighborhoods to the South, the up-and-coming commercial center of Seaport to the North, and the industrial sector surrounding it, this site sits directly at the center of a wavering identity crisis. This, along with the site’s location on the waterfront, provides a valuable opportunity to develop a new public center that engages with new visitors to the site as well as long-time residents of South Boston. Drawing inspiration from the nearby industrial/creative fabric developing in the area, this project proposes a new mixed-use “campus” of sorts for creative individuals in the area while creating multi-faceted connections between the vastly different “bubbles” developing in South Boston.

PAPPASWAY

SITE ENTRANCE

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

PROPOSED STREETS

PEDESTRIAN STREETS

PROPOSED BIKE PATHS

BLUE BIKE STATION

DORCHESTERSTREET

PAPPAS WAY

SOLAR ARRAYS

CREATIVE INDUSTRIAL OFFICES

COLLABORATION PLAZAS

MAKERS’ STUDIOS

LIVE/WORK COMPLEX

ROOFTOP RESTAURANT

MAKERS’ GALLERIES

MAKERS’ HUB

WELCOME CENTER

RESIDENTS’ PARKS

GREEN ROOFS

This design aims to create a seemless transition from the small-scale (3-story average) residential neighborhood to the South and the growing high-rise fabric of Seaport. Between these stark opposites a new creative hub is created, providing a self-sufficient campus-like environment with makers’ studios, living complexes, and galleries - as well as spaces in between for colllaboration. There are also creative industrial offices in the North corner of the site, similar to the offices currently in the area around the site. For the public, a “New Pappas Way” street is developed along the waterfront. It is surrounded by public ground-floor amenities including restaurants, boutiques, a museum, a welcome center, and a continuous string of piers that provide views across the water as well as recreational activities that engage with the creative fabric being developed within site.

POWER PLANT

MAKERS’ MARKET

VIEWING PLATFORM

There is no doubt that there exists an increasingly urgent issue in urban housing throughout cities around the world. This project aims to address specifically the lack of efficient and comfortable housing in Boston, MA. The goal was to design a prototype that is adaptable to site-specific conditions, taking inspiration from existing walk-up housing models. The walk-up housing model is being used because of its potential social benefits without traditionally dense, double-loaded corridors.

The concept for this project is a semi-private environment that encourages interaction between residences through the use of shared circulation cores as well as large, shared, elevated green spaces accessible to residents.

Boston building code was the basis for the technical decisions made in this project including egress stair distance, travel distance from the farthest point in each unit, and total number and measurements of shared and private stairs.

PROGRAM LAYOUT

PRIVATE (BEDROOM, BATHROOM)

PUBLIC (LIVING ROOM, KITCHEN)

SHARED CIRCULATION

ENTRANCE PATH

SHARED CIRCULATION

BEACH STREET

JOHN FITZGERALD SURFACE ROAD

LINCOLN STREET

After the pop-up library design, the scale of the project was meant to be expanded, to a full sized conceptual public library project for Chinatown. The goal was to design an environment that would serve the community in ways other than just supplying books - might that be technological access, lecture halls for educational use, private rooms for meetings, etc - thus creating a functional and modern library. This design in particular aims at a similar goal of the pop-up library: creating an environment - interior and exterior - that engages with all age groups.

Before jumping into the design process, a thorough investigation was done into the site’s context including surrounding green space, transportation, and direct pedestrian access.

ROSE KENNEDY GREENWAY

BOSTON, MA

ARMENIAN HERITAGE PARK; THE ARMENIAN WEEKLY RINGS FOUNTAIN; BOSTON DISCOVERY GUIDE

DEWEY SQUARE PARK; BOSTON MAGAZINE CHINATOWN PARK; NEWTON COURT

CHINATOWN LIBRARY PROPOSAL

CIRCULATION PATTERNS

STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS

This project was an experiment and challenge to create a structural system spanning 200’ by 80’ to house an open-air market at the SOWA market in Boston, MA. This new market hall would provide space for vendors as well as open seating for cafes as well as areas for growing vegetables inside. This design aims to create something visually striking for the neighborhood while still paying homage to the site’s historic materiality. An innovative and unique concrete folded plate structure was chosen as the main structural system, taking inspiration and data from other similar precedent work.

TRIBUTARY AREA

Here you can see both the floor plan and section of this structural system - the overall shape turns at the center to create a meandering entrance into the adjacent brick building (which this design proposes be developed as a new entrance to the site’s program). In the section you can more closely see the bay shapes being used/connected to create the folded plate system.

LONGITUDINAL SECTION AA

CONTINUOUS, REINFORCED CAST-IN PLACE CONCRETE

TRANSVERSE SECTION BB

APPLIED LOAD (wind/lateral load)

RESISTING FORCES

BAY TYPE 1

BAY TYPE 2

ADAPTIVE REUSE

Boston is one of many older cities that still bear the marks of industrialization from the 19th century - abandoned factories, warehouses, power plants, etc. line the shore of Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard even today. Ongoing conflict regarding what to do with these empty - often dangerous - spaces has prevented many restoration projects from gaining any traction within communities or governments. Public and private companies share ownership of these buildings, and there is yet to appear a large-scale, engaging, commnuity-driven plan for revitalizing these buildings with new use. This project grapples with the same issue facing the power building of the Navy Yard, or building 108. Over the years it has gained and lost purpose, and now sits as an abandoned bookend at the tail end of Building 107, currently used for storage and offices. This project aims to bring new life to this building as the new gateway into the long-isolated Navy Yard for residents of Charlestown and Boston as a whole.

EXISTING CIRCULATION

PROPOSED

PHASE 1

PHASE 2

DEMOLITION PHASE

PHASE 3

The site is meant to be circulated in two ways: perpendicular to the length of the building (through the markets towards the waterfront) and along the length of the building, through the museum spaces. This design aims to create a bridge into the Charlestown Navy Yard, attracting the public to its wide variety of programs, including markets similar to that of SOWA, museum spaces for appreciating the history of the site, as well as pop-up spaces where local artists/businesses can share their craft with the community in this new gathering space.

ENVISION RESILIENCE

The Envision Resilience Challenge is a recurring initiative that aims to bring together experts on climate change and resistence strategies with members of potentially affected communities and students with the intention of creating innovative solutions to the impending climate crisis. This year’s challenge included the reimagining of the sire adjacent to the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier in Providence Rhode Island - which today remains wildly outdated and underutilized. My initial approach to this site included two main goalsengagement and resilience. One area in which Providence is severly lacking is it’s public educational spaces - a gap I believe this site provides an opportunity to fill with a variety of museums and gallery spaces. While the site’s landscaping and topography heavily interact with climate concerns, the architecture spreads from beneath the I-195 bridge and culminates at three distinct points of entry facing a variety of intersecting neighborhoods including the quickly developing Jewelry District, downtown Providence, and the residential neighborhoods to the south. Each point defines a slightly different subset of this educational goal - a children’s science center, an ecological museum, and an industrial museum. The linear connectors beetweeen these three points provides a gallery that remains nestled within the berm, engaging with the intersection between the site and the water.

STORMWATER RUNOFF

Existing networks and connections were taken into account when designing the approach and traversal through the site. The existing berm is pushed towards the waterfront to create a more protected site to be programmed and activated for the neighborhood - including a mixture of hardscape and softscape programming. Within this space, I proposed a sprawling landscape of rain storage “tanks” mimicking the prior industrial storage that once defined this entire stretch of waterfront. These provide space for storm water runoff storage, highway runoff filtration, and improved habitats for nearby wildlife. Paths stretch from adjacent streets, meandering through these tanks before extending over the berm and towards views of the water. The landscape provides a pattern of modular tanks that can be aggregated over time along the rest of the industrial waterfront to encourage a more connected and engaged public - not only to provide improved waterfront programming, but to increase awareness on the issue of climate change.

STORM SURGE 40’

HURRICANE OF 1938 36’

SUPER STORM SANDY 27’

MEAN SEA LEVEL 20’

storm water runoff storage highway pollution filtration

CHILDREN’S SCIENCE CENTER

ECOLOGY MUSEUM

INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM

[Sectional Data from SWA]