LYNN, MA | 2026 | ADAPTIVE REUSE
Parallel Play inserts a headquarters, warehouse, and assembly floor, for a condom company with a rich queer, art-oriented, and public health history into a former industrial dairy and creamery. The project is driven by parallel imperatives at material, typological, and urban scales, combined with an identity-based approach of instrumentalized playfulness in the redevelopment of post-industrial American building stock, following the company’s own history of campaigns during the AIDS crisis with serious public health outcomes.
Given an existing opaque and windowless industrial building shell, a two-fold strategy of apertures and scrims introduces shafts of light into the deep interior while softening, filtering, and moderating its effects according to the needs of each working space. In the office, interiors are filtered and partitioned through a series of soft and perceptually malleable layers in place of normative walls. Chain mail curtain, acoustic sheers, dichroic films, and mirrors abound, each operating on sight, sound, publicness, and privacy. The language of domestic space, full of textiles and inviting softness, is borrowed as an adaptive response to the contemporary office environment, and hybridized with the material palette of both industrial and queer club environments. In the distribution center and assembly floor, oversized punched openings at a range of sizes and heights reduce reliance on artificial lighting and provide skylight views for factory workers. These strategies seek to playfully and humanely reconceptualize the construction of the architectural wall and the configuration of the factory floor. The industrial curtain is brought into the office, and office comforts to the warehouse and assembly line floor, and each given large openings to view outwards, inwards, and between.
In adapting an industrial type, we found the bulk of our work was in choosing which elements of the building to remove; a language of cuts, excisions, and controlled demolitions. In this case, the adaptation of post-industrial building stock to offices generated more reusable building materials than those we added.
The complex started as the West Lynn Creamery, which was the fourth largest industrial dairy in the country during its operation, before expanding into and becoming the Garelick Farms industrial dairy creamery which served a majority of schools in Massachusetts. Because of the loss of the industrial dairy and the 300 local jobs that were supported by it, the city was highly invested in our success. Looking to revitalize their postindustrial building stock, they supported more radical solutions than might be typical in the American town context. This gave us a great deal of room to play.
The first phase of construction was dedicated entirely to the reclamation of materials, starting with industrial machinery. Usable storage tanks and equipment were removed and resold rather than demolished. Following this, we focused on recyclable metals: demolition of ducting, piping, and cold rolled steel. We contracted with scrapyards who haul, shred, and resmelt metals. The last and perhaps most significant carbon reuse was in the demolition of masonry, which Massachusetts very fortunately has quite strict incentivized recycling and reuse policies for, through their Construction and Demolition Waste Management policies. Asphalt, brick, and concrete (ABC) are all considered highly recyclable materials and were collected for crushing and reuse as aggregate.
In this industrial building in particular, we encountered an interior concrete topography, given the plinths, platforms, and sloped pitches each space was given to accommodate drainage, storage tanks, and heavy equipment. Ceilings were a clean datum, but floors were a cast topography. Much of our time was spent in slowly removing this sectional poche that largely accommodated machines and liquids more than humans.
In each of these reclamation phases, decisions had to be collaboratively made onsite, between GC, AOR, Design Architect, Project Manager, Client Rep, and Developer. As-builts did not exist at the level of resolution needed, and little drawing took place in this phase, which allowed us to move quickly and affordably. It’s worth noting that the budget for the entire 45,000 square foot complex was under 6M, giving us $130 a square foot for budget which had to include substantial building systems upgrades as well as floors leveled to the precise tolerances of contemporary warehousing. Despite this, design and construction (inclusive) took course over a highly fast-tracked timeline of 16 months.
After the reclamation phase, we continued to work subtractively. In minimizing virgin construction and carbon, we looked to Matta Clark to produce functional apertures, facade, and daylighting. These cuts were the first moments of designed and drawn rather than discussed precision in the project: Cut edges required careful re-seaming, reinforcement, and at times reinforced backing. Here, CMU really became our friend; often used in industrial types as the fastest and cheapest way to infill structure, it also allowed us to cut and patch with this unit that hadn't changed in its specs or dimensions over the decades the complex had been built up.
These strategies point to an instrumentalized irreverence that emerged through conversation with the client, and an understanding of their role in the history of public health campaigns and the AIDS crisis of the early 1990s. The company – Global Protection Corp – is the largest distributor of condoms and advocacy partner to the public sector, including Planned Parenthood, and the state governments of Massachusetts, Rhode Island. They also partner with an almost dizzying number of queer subcultures, producing imagery and advocacy in the terms of each, including icons like Tom of Finland (for the leather community). What emerged from our love for this history and the attitude of the client is a sort of alignment between material, ethical, and performance strategies, integrated via an ethos of play.