Emerging Voices 2015
Merge Architects
Recorded: March 19, 2015
Working at the intersection of digital fabrication and the handmade, Merge Architects seeks “invention in the ordinary.” Principal Elizabeth Whittaker, who founded the firm in 2003, describes her Boston home as a “challenging” place for contemporary architecture, resulting in a practice that seeks design innovation while remaining contextual to the city’s historic and industrial fabric. Working at scales from furniture to multi-family housing, the firm participates in the construction of nearly all its projects even as the scope and geography of the work expand.
In her Emerging Voices lecture, Whittaker offers an overview of the practice and early work before focusing on five recent projects. The firm’s first building, the Penn Street Lofts in Quincy, MA, sought to create an identity for a normally anonymous typology — multi-family housing — by “puzzling together” single- and double-height spaces that are expressed through the window and cladding treatments on the façade. The Marginal Lofts in East Boston is a nine-unit building adjacent to an operating shipyard with a steel mesh façade hand-sewn by a fisherman; when in season, plants crawl the front to create a vertical garden. A proposal for a health and wellness center at a YMCA summer camp respects the surrounding forest by using the location of existing trees to guide the massing and mimicking the patterns of the forest on the building envelope. The GrowBox, a single-family house in Lexington, MA, has a series of courtyards that weave the surrounding garden inside, conflating the interior and exterior. A proposal for the renovation of an urban village in China employs a matrix of interventions for the ancient neighborhood to create new opportunities for gathering and tourism.
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