Boston’s Big Dig project became famous for all the wrong reasons – delays, fraud, fired personnel, and massive over budget spending.

On the flip side, the award-winning architectural firm SsD made good out of bad when they created the Big Dig House which reused over 600,000 lbs of salvaged material from the old I-93 highway.

According to SsD the Big Dig House used a prefab like planning system to put all those recycled parts together, and can be a prototype for future building projects that will save time, money, and resources, “Planning the reassembly of the materials in a similar way one would systematically compose with a pre-fab system, subtle spatial arrangements are created from the large-scale highway components. These same components however are capable of carrying much higher loads than standard building materials, thus easily allowing the integration of large scale planted roof gardens. Most importantly, the project demonstrates an untapped potential for the public realm: with strategic front-end planning, much needed community programs including schools, libraries, and housing could be constructed whenever infrastructure is deconstructed, saving valuable resources, embodied energy, and taxpayer dollars.”

In the end SsD’s Big Dig House is a brilliant compilation of environmental savvy, exquisite structural design, timely construction planning, and beautiful material choices. Read post in Inhabitat.