Thompson Island Outward Bound is a private non-profit organization dedicated to giving young people the skills for outdoor adventure and leadership. Their curriculum includes hiking, mountaineering, kayaking and sailing. Located on Thompson Island in the Boston Harbour in buildings originally accommodating a reformatory up on the high ground, the organisation needed an expedition center closer to the water’s edge with a meeting hall, toilets and showers and extensive equipment storage space. Andrew Scott, who teaches at MIT, and I worked on this with the idea of making the building environmentally efficient. In addition, since we were building on an island, pre-fabricated components shipped on barges from the wharf in the Boston Marine Industrial Park was part of the design strategy.

As things transpired, the process for appointing a contractor with whom we could work on environmentally efficient construction and prefabrication was not as successful as we had hoped. The selected contractor had an excellent track record in interior office fittings but not, unfortunately, in the prime aspects we had been banking on. The building is of conventional construction, and building materials - not prefabricated or panelised components - were brought in on the ferry. One of the more memorable phases of the work was the carpenters working in windchill temperatures of -40F.