Salvage Artists.(Single Speed Design)(Big Dig House)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 19-MAR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

One day in the winter of 2003, John Hong opened an e-mail to Single Speed Design, the architecture firm he runs with his wife, Jinhee Park, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was from a structural engineer named Paul Pedini, who said that he had seen a Single Speed project and liked it so much that he wanted to hire the firm for an unusual project. He explained that he worked at a contracting company that had spent a decade on the Big Dig, the huge project to replace Boston's elevated Central Artery with a tunnel, and that he had come up with the idea of using steel and concrete salvaged from the project to put up a building. "It would be sort of like Junkyard Wars meets Habitat for Humanity," he wrote.

Hong wondered how to respond. "You get a lot of weird e-mails if you put your sign in front of a construction site," he said. But he and Park went to meet Pedini in a junk yard a few miles north of Boston where the company was storing highway sections. "When I saw all this stuff, I realized he was serious," Hong said.

The eventual result was the Big Dig House, which was...

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