Summer’s over and it’s studio time. On Friday, MIT’s second year architecture students went on a site visit to the Boston Ice Storage Company on Norfolk St. in Boston. The studio will be an adaptive reuse of this remarkable 8 story concrete box in the New Market area of Roxbury. I’ll be acting as head TA for this course and will hopefully be updating with impressive and exciting work by the students.

In mid-August, the block that the building is on suffered a massive fire that leveled one of the adjacent buildings but left the Ice House untouched because of it’s construction, namely concrete. The building has been in disuse for several years and, with the exception of some discoloration, looked just like this before the fire. The inside is totally striking. As John Ochsendorf said “It’s a 20th century Peter Zumthor chapel.”

All photos by George Lin: