Geminate Forms for Social Supports

Abstract

The severity of Boston’s addiction crisis can largely be attributed to the closure of the city’s public health campus on Long Island (Boston Harbor) in 2014. This project proposes to dispense with the ineffective and superannuated model of centralized addiction treatment embodied at Long Island and instead design a series of interventions across greater Boston that complete a continuum of care for those struggling with addiction, to be built using public funds won in lawsuits against drug companies. Reviving the discourse of typology, each intervention will provide a spectrum of services while acting as a node of the network. This approach embodies the harm reduction principle of “meeting people where they are,” both in terms of their addiction and their physical location. The Long Island campus will persist in the re-use of its bricks in the interventions, which will be a mixture of new buildings and additions to existing facilities.