Jennifer Bonner | Spring 2017

With Khorshid Naderi-Azad and Marianna Gonzalez

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This project rethinks the role of luxury in multi-family housing today. It injects cultural phenomena (including the GIF, the representation tool engaged with throughout the semester) that are symptomatic of our lives into the traditional residential typology of Boston, the triple decker, to propose a new set of typologies that more productively engage with who we are, how we live, and what we care about.

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We closely studied the song “Bad & Boujee” by the Atlanta rappers Migos, which expresses the dichotomies embedded in contemporary conditions and ambitions.

The artists drink champagne while eating microwaved ramen, they smoke weed inside a BMW X5 while pulled over at a housing project.

Contemporary luxury is about layering. This project uses the ways that people misread objects, forms, spaces, and social constructs, to shape a housing development where all people can share city. Through purposeful misreading, it obscures and disguises luxury in the contemporary city.

Olympic Flame Development consists of 135 buildings that are variations of 5 new residential typologies. These 5 types are all alterations of the traditional triple decker. Variations on luxury were produced by taking the volume of the 5 types, stretching and squashing the mass to produce different heights and slenderness ratios while maintaining the same number of occupants.

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No building in the development matches another, but no building is foreign. The urban fabric is cohesive but not monotonous. The project revamps the ordinary triple decker to embody the complexities that we experience in our contemporary lives by layering and misreading.

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