This project proposes an entanglement between long and short-term forms of living for the bell hooks Creative Residency in the Dorchester Neighborhood of Boston. As a well-known author, activist, professor, and scholar who was an advocate for Black feminism, hooks wrote over 40 books and many scholarly works and lectures over her lifetime. Her work examined American society with a critical lens and a particular focus on intersectionality as a framework to look and think critically about race, gender, class, sexuality, space, patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. This project proposes a residence in honor of her legacy, a space where creatives and critical thinkers can engage their work within the context of a historically black neighborhood. As such, the work explores how to fit three artist-in-residency suites, two family dwellings units, and communals spaces within the scale of a house. For hooks, self determination and self actualization are essential in engaging one’s potential and honing one’s agency within and against systems of oppression. In this example, the idea of the house accommodates both the institutional and intimated gestures found in domestic spaces to reformat how one might engage with a body of knowledge or creative work. In using the triple-decker as an architectural framework to design from, the residency carves out a space within the neighborhood of Dorchester for artist and families to discover and establish new forms of collective creation and housing.

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