Cambridge Post Office Intervention
with Duncan Steele
critics: Shingo Masuda & Diego Grass
fall 2023
This half-semester studio called for “necessary” interventions that would benefit the houseless population of Cambridge. We identified the Clifton Merriman Post Office as a site of importance for that community, particularly the general delivery mail system by which individuals without an address or P.O box can receive correspondence.
The project proposes a renovation of the office’s interior to accommodate a revamped general delivery system. Interior walls are retrofitted with thousands of P.O. box panels such that each city resident is given an address internal to the post office, as well shared lockers for larger packages. Although houselessness is fundamentally an urban scale problem, we developed a large 1:20 model of the post office to articulate how we might productively intervene at a finer grain of detail.
The proposal attempts to take up the collectivist spirit of New Deal architecture and plays on conventions of WPA ornament to question how a post office might serve a new understanding of the public.
