Highway Confederate 21

COLLECTIVE CONSENT

Critic: Ron Witte Studio: Core 4 | Relate Site: Roxbury, MA Date: Spring 2020 Partner: Rachel Coulomb

The fourth and final semester of core consists of a multi-family housing project in the Roxbury neighborhood of Greater Boston. We see this proposition as an extension to Robin Evans’ 1978 essay “Figures, Doors, and Passages”. For him, elements of the plan selectively divide and reunite social interactions. Doors recast daily patterns of life, corridors facilitate and reduce contact. Ultimately, the architecture is the evidence of everyday conduct. Thus we present “Figures, Doors, Passages... and Consent.” Adding consent means adding negotiation. Consent operates using doors, windows, walls, elements we already use as tools in our field. But we must shift our focus to their weight in designing an exchange between individuals. One that ensures all parties agree upon the act of collection, ownership and access to one another. Our proposal for a housing development located along Jamaica Plain’s Green Street Transit Station defines a new set of conditions regarding consent in domestic and public spaces. The project is developed through architectural interpretations of existing legal definitions of consent in order to reread them through the design.

Unanimous Consent Informed Consent Implied Consent: Expressed Consent

This project proposes a new method of defining architecture and stressing the importance of our role in negotiating, not speculating, on social conditions. It is not a technique of two extremes, as no individuals live in binary conditions of interactions. Rather within each lens of consent are variations of collection, ownership, and access to one another.

SILHOUETTE

BIG BAR + LITTLE BARS

SHIFTING SIDEDNESS

THREE VILLAGES

SECOND FLOOR PLAN COURTYARD + BACKYARD

Permission given by surrounding parties. This should be the designers aim in situating ones project in the given context. Once again, not as a referential act to what is existing, but properly adding to the growth and development of the neighborhood.

The front of house is a flat bar holding the street edge and mirroring the urban condition of the transit line across the street.

The back of house individuates into little bars acknowledging the domestic neighborhood adjacent to our site.

Permission granted with the knowledge of possible consequences. It exists at the urban scale and determines how the public interacts with the project.

The larger opening with views to the public backyard is a welcoming acknowledgment for one to pass through and enjoy.

But when met with the courtyard condition and the blankness of an intimate space, one acknowledges the unfamiliarity and regards it as private entry.

Consent that is not expressly granted by a subject, but rather implicitly granted through the circumstance of a particular situation. In this case, the corridor. By designing circulation as a series of implicit circumstances, we can create negotiations of ownership outside of the units.

When met by a corridor culminating in one solid door, one understands this as owned by the occupant. Another inhabitant does not have implicit consent in breaching this implied threshold.

By adding a door to the adjacent unit and changing the partition type, there is an implied threshold of collective ownership.