Adaptive Reuse:
When a Bar Meets Plinths

This adaptive reuse project transforms a suburban office park into a modern residential community in Chelsea, MA, through a strategic overlaying of the bar as a new typology with the original deep-plated office buildings. The intervention introduces a series of freestanding bars that attach to the existing structures, which are unified through a landscape that is designed with flood resiliency. The design of the ground plane hosts greenery, playgrounds, waterscapes, and covered gathering spaces underneath the bars. By embracing water as part of the community's daily life, this design frames a flooding condition as an extension of the existing environment.