Liminal House
The House today is in crisis, and a fertile site for critical discourse. The subject being described is conceptually destabilized under increasing stress, which sets the stage for the emergence of entirely new species of domestic spaces we will come to inhabit.
The challenge to reimagine domestic space today is to reclaim the house from the economical, and to liberate the home from the technological.
To start, we design along three possible paths the House can develop in the near future. The Freudian, Marxian, and Euclidean House. In the Freudian sense, home is a metaphorical extension of the “self”. Its walls are conceptual membranes that construct a reflective interiority against the wilderness beyond.
The infinity mirror room of Yayoi Kusama are Freudian Spaces, infinitley reflecting its users. A case study investigation of Kusama’s spaces was conducted by recreating them in model and drawin. Rather than push the project in a direction that would recreate the material conditions, I become more interested in the role of the threshold of Kusama’s spaces. For the infinity rooms the threshold acts as a barrier into the unexpected. Instead of moving into another room the threshold into the mirrored rooms takes users into a moment between two spaces and into the wall.
Translating that to 33 Bond street, a newly finished apartment building in Brooklyn brought on the idea of introducing the wall as an occupyable space. The result strips away the existing structure on concrete columns in favor of two CLT walls, three and a half feet apart that are placed on the existing column grid.
The “thick” walls become spaces that are infill by the the basic needs for living: storage, toilets, showers, kitchens, and circulation. This frees the floor plans up to becoming free plans for the residents, encouraging the individual users to engage the space in infinite ways. The typological indifference to style allows for the plan and its associated slogan to open up to new modes of cohabitation, producing new structures of power and persuasion.
Mentored by Jing Liu
Columbia GSAPP
