“We had a ball designing and building this house,” says Paul Pedini of his Lexington, Massachusetts, home, which uses 300 tons of material cast off from the Central Artery, a demolished and rerouted Boston highway. The I-beams, steel columns, century-old wooden marine piers, and 13 reinforced-concrete Inversets (weighing up to 25 tons each) were rescued from the Big Dig, one of the largest public-works projects in the country’s history. “The momentum created by the reuse of the highway slabs and steel beams made us look at the recycling of many items that we would never have normally considered,” Pedini continues. “It is possible to use almost any otherwise unwanted object, if you work hard enough and use a good coat of paint, to create good design.”

Pedini drafted Cambridge-based Single Speed Design to design the home. Construction went quickly because the team used highway ramps and bridge piers as-is, and framed the house using the same methods employed to put up the original Interstate 93 offramps. The interlocking boxes and planes of glass, steel, concrete, and cedar retain the epic stature of their previous lives as temporary elevated roadways.

Pedini, an engineer specializing in highways and tunnels, had the idea to recycle the materials and, serving as his own general contractor, cut and drilled the steel himself, along with his wife, Cristina Perez-Pedini, and two ironworkers. The structure, which once bore the weight of a highway trafficked by 18-wheel trucks, can carry massive loads. Atop the flat garage and the highest section of roof, bamboo gardens are sustained by rainwater stored in an underground storage tank also salvaged from the Big Dig, in a rain-collection system engineered by Perez-Pedini, who is a water-resources engineer.

The house could have implications for the public realm if, in future large-scale demolitions, recycling were to become part of urban planning. Strategic, front-end efforts like this could save valuable resources, embodied energy, and taxpayer dollars. But will we listen?