Theseus: A New Housing Typology
Joe Russell and Emma Sheffer
Harvard University Graduate School of Design, M.Arch I
Theseus takes decommissioned steel cargo holds from dry bulk carriers and reuses them as five superstructures that carry a 150-bed housing complex next to the Port of Chelsea in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Floor plates, walls, and circulation hang from a grid of steel tension members, which opens the ground plane and lifts the living spaces above it. That single move answers three pressures at once: rising flood risk, the scarcity of building material, and households whose needs change over time. Because none of the interior walls carry load, operable party walls let residents combine or divide units as families grow or shrink. It is adaptive reuse at the scale of a ship, and it treats marine steel as a structural resource rather than scrap.
