The house that the Central Artery built

I suppose it had to occur to someone. Why not build a house out of some of the junked material that was once Boston's Central Artery?

''It was a graveyard of materials," says John Hong, speaking of the piles of steel and concrete that rose when wreckers pulled down the Artery. Hong is an architect in the youthful firm of Single Speed Design, in Cambridge.

''They didn't know what to do with the material, and they were running out of land to store it on," says Paul Pedini, the owner of the house, who came up with the idea.

So Pedini found a site on Moon Hill in Lexington. Working with Hong, he designed and built a house for himself and family.

It's always interesting to discover how clients find their architects. Pedini hoped, at first, to build in Cambridge. He was driving around that city looking for a site when he spotted the Single Speed office, a building the firm designed and built for itself. ''I stopped in my tracks," he remembers. '' 'That's what I want,' I thought."

Both the office and the house are boxy, flat-roofed, and contemporary-looking. ''I wanted the beauty of industrial materials," says Pedini. ''I wanted high wide spaces, wide open to each other. I wanted to let the outside in, wanted a big entertainment space. We wouldn't have to shorten the long steel sections we brought from the Artery."

''The design began with the challenge of the materials," says Hong. ''The materials tell you what to do." It was almost as if he was told to assemble a house out of a pile of pre-cut pieces he had no part in selecting.

The materials were free. Pedini paid only to ship them. Pedini is an engineer who specializes in highways and tunnels. He supervised much of the building of the new Artery tunnels. He was able to act as his own general contractor on the house, bringing in help and heavy equipment as needed. As a result, he says, the final cost was a modest $150 per square foot.

The house was framed up -- steel frame and concrete floors -- in four net days, Pedini says with obvious pride. ''I cut and drilled the steel with two ironworkers."

It's a house built of huge chunks of steel that function as beams and columns, with large expanses of glass. The floors are concrete stained dark gray. The exterior walls are finished in cedar or zinc siding. In one place, a big X of crossed steel cables is used for wind bracing.

You'd think such a house might feel like a garage. It's sober, certainly. But the high spaces are exhilarating, they are filled with daylight, and they offer views everywhere of the wooded site. Some of the details are satisfyingly dramatic. The fireplace in the great room, for example, which is made of basaltic stone in a color called Inca Gray, is spanned by a monster steel beam. No one, you feel, will successfully invade this house.

From inside, you can walk out onto the planted roof of the garage. Pedini and his wife call it the Asian garden. Here rainwater is collected for irrigation. A stone dragon, rescued from recently demolished gates in Boston's Chinatown, presides as host.

So should we all be running to demolition sites to stock up on materials to build our dream houses on the cheap?

The answer, clearly, is no. Steel must be shipped, it usually must be cut and fitted, it must be drilled for bolts, and so forth. Only because he was willing to work with the sizes he found, and because he did so much of the work himself, was Pedini able to build his house for so little.

It is a successful symbol, though. It's a symbol of a future world of sustainability, one in which people will no longer thoughtlessly ravage the earth's limited resources but instead will save and recycle far more carefully than we do now.

A good journalist leaves no question unasked. Why the name Single Speed Design? What is the deep metaphorical significance?

''When we started, we all rode single speed bikes," says Hong. ''We needed to come up with a name in a hurry to get insurance."

Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.