This Architect’s Cambridge Home Is a Testing Ground for Sustainable Design

MASS Design Group cofounder Alan Ricks upgrades his "not structurally sound" bungalow with innovative materials and enough solar panels to produce more energy than it consumes.

While living with two children under four years old in a fifth-floor walkup apartment in Boston’s South End, Alan Ricks and Cristina de la Cierva started thinking about a move. When their third baby was born in 2020 during the pandemic, it became a necessity.

Across the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the couple found a 1950s bungalow in a neighborhood they loved less than two miles from Harvard Square. In its lifetime, the house had been converted into a duplex and received a third-story addition that Alan—an architect and cofounding principal of Boston-based nonprofit MASS Design Group—deemed "not structurally sound."

Regardless, they purchased the single-family home that year, and Alan immediately began its gut renovation. In typical fashion for an architect’s home, the project quickly became a testing ground for the principles Alan had been exploring at the studio. 

See the full story on Dwell.com: This Architect’s Cambridge Home Is a Testing Ground for Sustainable Design
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