MArch I

Same:same

Advised by Jon Lott 

The North American suburb produces a profoundly finite spatial sequencing from the urban to the architectural. The experience of the interior, primarily domestic space is kept dogmatically concealed, where rooms and the lives that are lived within them can only be approximated from the exterior, hidden behind manicured, patinaed exteriors. 

To begin to unravel this paradigm, the possibility of experiencing the other simultaneously with the self seeks to be given architectural form. The argument can be made that the suburban domestic interior is completely unremarkable until it is placed in visible comparison or juxtaposition with another similar interior, or by beginning to unravel the banality of the traditional container and contained dialectic. 

The thesis seeks to articulate methods by which the spatial polarity of the suburban house may be exploded, where interiors are divorced from their containers and become part of an open and informal, public spatial narrative. By this, the project hopes to expose hidden phenomena inherent to the architecture of the suburban home, such as mirrorings and hidden rooms, indulging the observer in their fundamental need to know, the curiosity of what lurks behind closed doors, and to compare the space of one’s own to that of the other. Through a series of inversions and formal manipulations, domestic space is duplicated into public space, transforming the domestic into spectacle. By simply replicating an existing context, the thesis radicalizes and accelerates sameness, while revealing its ultimately imperfect nature.