Beantown Dream

In this tightly packed Northeast city where developers pounce first on any available lot, two young architects found a rare ground-up opportunity.

Over the past few years, John Hong and Jinhee Park have watched buildings proliferate around their three-story house. From the roof deck, the most action-packed view is east facing, where Goliath high-rise apartments gather around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Smack in the middle, Stephen Holl’s 2002 dormitory stands square and porous, like SpongeBob in a gray tweed suit. Farther off and almost obscured by new construction is an old Boston landmark: the pastel-striped cylindrical holding tank of the old Necco wafer factory, recently converted to a biotech facility.

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Virginia Gardiner
Our "Process" queen Virginia Gardiner currently lives in London, where she is finishing up a master's degree in industrial design engineering. "It has been fun but also tiring," she reports.

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