AIR: A SHARED RESOURCE

Fall 2025

Air: A Shared Resource is a speculative co-housing project in Lincoln, Massachusetts, developed through a non-optimized methodology. Whereas architecture is often treated as a problem of material efficiency, the project reframes it as a collective resource, placing the shared experience of air at its center. My contribution to the larger co-housing proposal is a community threshold: a thickened wall that simultaneously contains housing and a shared sauna. Organized around thermal principles, the wall is oriented toward the sun to absorb and store heat, and is constructed using traditional stone fireplaces capable of retaining warmth for days at a time. Drawing from regional stonework traditions in Lincoln, the wall is imagined as a communal act of making. The construction of the wall utilizes wobble and wedge techniques to poduce a structure that privileges mass, time, and care over optimization.

The project is structured around a clear timeline and phasing of construction, organized programmatically from the inside out and spatially from the most public to the most private. A path embedded within the wall regulate degrees of privacy, while the sauna sequence introduces a winding circulation that amplifies thermal transitions and bodily awareness. These spatial delays and gradients reinforce atmosphere as an architectural medium rather than a technical byproduct. The project explores permanence not as fixity, but as endurance: where thermal delight, maintenance, and shared atmosphere become the foundation for communal living and a storytelling approach to architectural longevity.