Single Speed Design

Photo by Eugene Oh

The Big Dig, a megaproject to re-route Interstate 93 into a massive highway tunnel underneath the city of Boston, was America’s most expensive highway improvement effort. Hundreds of engineers planned it, city residents protested it, environmentalists decried it. By project’s end, it had cost 15 billion dollars and generated 300 tons of scrap steel and concrete. And Jinhee Park and John Hong, the husband and wife architecture team behind Single Speed Designs, saw a house in it.

“We wanted to know what all this debris and waste could become,” Hong says, explaining how he and Park used material salvaged from the 300 tons of scrap to create a 4,300 square foot home, complete with soaring overhead loft and rooftop garden. It was a difficult task, but one that demonstrated the possibilities that exist when engineering and architecture come together. The two spent more than a year researching the site and the structural capability of the salvaged pieces, taking photos and measurements and sketching detailed blueprints. “It was almost like we were curating junk,” says Hong.

Part of the challenge was shaping the scrap materials, which were designed to build highways, into the business of a house. The pair struck upon a clever solution: “We assembled the house exactly how a highway would be assembled,” explains Hong. “Sometimes it’s better to work with the material instead of fighting it.” (The house was then constructed in a Boston suburb largely by Paul Pedini, a structural engineer who had spent ten years working on the Big Dig, and who first suggested the project to Single Speed after being struck by their Valentine Street condominium project.)

With experience working for firms like Samsung and SANAA, Park and Hong brought a wealth of experience to the table when they started Single Speed in 2001. The name came from the bicycles they used to ride to work – a simple contraption that taught them about function over flashiness and the importance of forward movement.

While the humble thirtysomethings are quick to downplay their accomplishments, the firm has won prizes from the Architectural League of New York and garnered praise from as far as Korea and Japan. Although currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts (they both teach at nearby Harvard, where they met as students), they’re now working on a project in Seoul entitled “Finding Wasteland,” which seeks a way to revitalize abandoned sites in high-density urban centers. The thinking, Park and Hong say, is simple: if urban land can be redeveloped, there is no need to build on green fields and destroy virgin spaces.

“It’s not just about recycling or saving energy anymore,” says Hong. “The word sustainability implies creating a whole system, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”