2024 Rotch Winner: Lindsey Krug
Lindsey Krug is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
After graduating from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with an MArch in 2019, Lindsey moved to Chicago to work for Studio Gang Architects. Later she transitioned to teaching full time as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to pursue her primary interests, which lie in analyzing the social and cultural impacts of architecture on the bodies that occupy built space. Through the lens of the architectural user as a body in space, Lindsey's work focuses on how design solidifies and reinforces bodily taboos, hierarchies, and inequities into built form and seeks alternative futures for architectural inhabitants. She has contributed to spatial research investigating human rights abuses against protesters in the 2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, ongoing and projected climate risks of melting permafrost in Russia, and relationships between gender, typology, and the architectural generic. Most recently, her research has focused on 1) the legacy of a constitutional right to privacy, its impacts on architectural space and 2) the architectural and environmental eco-system enabling and resulting from the expansion of the dollar store industry in America and abroad.
Preliminary Competition Entry
New Corner on the Block
A public space on Winter Street
New Corner on the Block proposes a new public space on Winter Street while responding to the problems of streetwall contiguity and access created by the typical commercial storefront. As an infill block, 42-46 Winter Street and its neighbors fail to invite the public in, creating a defensive frontage. In response, NCOTB creates a new corner lot in the middle of the block that breaks the existing two-retail frontage into four spaces with access to Winter Street. By rotating the residential circulation core (without any modification to the existing stairs and elevators), 42-46 Winter is opened up for public programming, day and night.
The new ground-level design for 42-46 Winter Street has four primary features: 1) a small retail space with a large glass storefront; 2) a half-court basketball court along with two additional hoops for pick-up games; 3) a large, flexible gallery and workshop space with sliding glass doors allowing events to spill out into the basketball space when there’s an event like a gallery opening; and 4) a covered porch with benches, tables, and two 24-hour public restrooms for passersby to sit and rest, eat lunch, or watch a pick-up game. The four new spaces are unified by bright green bent metal bars that bend as needed to provide cladding, seating, pull-up bars for working out, and ceiling coverage to hide mechanical and electrical systems.
Monumental Maintenance presents a new "maintenance district" for the city of Boston in the form of an archipelago of monuments – small and large – for the communities past and present who take care of our environments and the materials that make it possible. The focal point of this new district is the existing Boston Public Works (BPW) facility, which is located in a challenging site. The BPW site is flanked to the west by I-93 overpasses and to the east by rail lines that have together made the BPW site an inaccessible "island." Ironically, that which the BPW helps maintain and keeps running smoothly also isolates it from the rest of the city. To help integrate the current BPW "island," the new district operationalizes a series of recreational installations, educational monuments, green spaces, and public amenities by scattering them across the site forming an "archipelago of care."
Three educational monuments called “The Pudding,” “The Post,” and “The Cone” help educate visitors on the immense labor BPW provides to the public. The Pudding features a 260-ton chunk of local Roxbury Puddingstone (Massachusetts’ state rock). Its weight is symbolic of the 260,000 tons of solid waste that BPW collects annually (1000 times the weight of the stone). Its material is symbolic of the bedrock of the city and commemorates millenia of land stewards in the region. The Post features a series of illuminated metal posts that ascend up and over I-93 and commemorates the 68,055 street lights BPW maintains. The posts form a playground at grade underneath I-93. The Cone – shaped like the iconic traffic marker – offers the public a viewing tower to look out over ongoing BPW projects and the 802 miles of roadways BPW maintains.
