He could call it his Big Digs
Contracting firm's vice president aims to turn project leftovers into main course, his Lexington home
If they can beat swords into ploughshares, Paul Pedini thought, why not turn highway into housing?
A vice president at the Big Dig's biggest contractor, Modern Contintental, Pedini figured there had to be another purpose for the thousands of tons of steel, concrete, and hardware used for temporary ramps and roadway as the Central Artery was being buried underground.
Waste not, want not, Pedini said he learned after years of living in Cambridge, where bottles and newspapers are religiously carted to the recycling bin. So he is using the long steel beams and sections of roadway that once carried 18-wheelers as the building blocks of his new house.
"It's great material," the 48-year-old engineer said.
Dubbed the Big Dig house, the building is under construction in Lexington. Plans call for the highway beams to be prominent vertical and horizontal supports. Concrete roadway decking will become floors and ceilings. Spare rebar, the stiff metal poles that reinforce concrete, are envisioned to enclose a spiral staircase. Steel forms used to make precast beams are to become planters. Sloped supports used to hold up walls are to be lawn sculptures.
"It's infectious," Pedini said on a tour of the staging area in Everett where the materials are being stored. "We kept seeing aesthetic qualities in the materials headed for the dumpsters."
The structure will be so sturdy that Pedini plans a big garden for the roof. And, he said, the steel columns that once held up the loop ramps connecting the Tobin Bridge to Interstate 93 "are now going to be holding up my bedroom."
Big Dig officials say they were unaware of Pedini's creative reuse of materials from the massive highway project. Generally, contractors can use leftover construction materials, as well as the demolished elevated Central Artery, in any way they please, said project spokesman Doug Hanchett.
"If you hired a roofer to do your house and he had extra shingles left, he can take them with him," Hanchett said. In some cases, like with temporary bridges, contracts call for their return to the state.
"Everyone here thinks it's an excellent thing that this material, rather than going to a scrapyard, is being used. It will be a living testament to the project," Hanchett said.
Pedini called on a Cambridge architectural firm, Single Speed Design, to come up with the plans for buildings made out of the materials. The firm designed two projects: a condominium and town house complex for a small triangular lot off Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, and the new private home for Pedini.
John Hong, principal at Single Speed Design and a graduate of the Harvard Design School, said he was thrilled when he heard from Pedini, who noticed the firm's handiwork -- a minimalist, three-unit apartment building -- while jogging in Cambridge.
"He saw something very Single Speed -- taking materials as they are, making them beautiful, and not playing any formal games with them," said Hong, who works with his wife, Jinhee Park, like him a native of Korea. The firm's name is a reference to the functional single-speed bicycle -- stripped down and elegant.
Because of their structural strength, highway materials can support heavy amenities, like swimming pools and backyards, otherwise unavailable to urban residents, Hong said.
The 18-unit condo and town-house complex the firm designed for a site north of Porter Square, owned by Modern Continental, ran into problems. City officials told Hong that the design would have to undergo a thorough review process; meanwhile, the developer willing to fund the project wanted to hide the highway beams behind brick.
At that point, Pedini and Hong decided to put the Cambridge complex on hold, and concentrate on the Lexington house -- which they hope will be a prototype that proves "this is really possible and quite easy to build," Hong said.
The Lexington house requires no special zoning, but neighbors were initially cool to the idea. The site is part of the Six Moon Hill community -- a subdivision of sleek, modernist homes built by the Architects Collaborative starting in 1948, based largely on the rejection of conventional construction. The residents blanched at the idea of showcasing steel highway beams, Hong said, and insisted that the exterior have more a traditional building material, like wood.
"It was certainly very different from the other homes here, but I thought it was suitable for that lot," said Sally Harkness, one of the original residents of the wooded enclave, just off Route 2 and about 3 miles from Lexington Green.
Still, the results are striking. In the space for the living room and kitchen, a long steel beam runs along the ceiling, in the style of an exposed wooden beam in a Colonial-era home.
The project, which along with the Cambridge complex won a competition for innovative design sponsored by New York-based Metropolis magazine, is environmentally friendly in much larger ways, Hong and Pedini say. Not only are they reusing roadway materials, but the house will be energy-efficient: It will be heated by coils inserted into the concrete roadway decking that serves as the floor, creating "ambient" warm air that uses less energy than conventional heating systems. Also, no trees were cut down for lumber.
Hong and Pedini hope to draw on Big Dig craftsmen who know how to work with the materials -- and who are increasingly out of work as the project winds down -- to build additional highway homes.
"There's plenty of this stuff around, if others pick up on this," Pedini said, gesturing around to the stacks of decking and steel beams at the Everett scrapyard. There is more discarded material at a site in Lancaster; it could be harvested to build public housing, he said.
"I do feel like the guy in the junkyard, walking around and picking all this stuff up," he said, recalling how he collected nuts worth $20 each from the base plates on support columns.
"The government mandates you use the best material. But it's up for a year or two, and then it's just taken down."
Anthony Flint can be reached at flint@globe.com. 