Thesis / 2024 - 2025
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Advised by Stan Allen
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Micro spaces are simultaneously the most and least understood typology—the most in that each configuration has been rigorously tested to its optimum, and the least in that architects have nearly no control or data about their post-occupancy. There is a raw realness from the utilization of every square inch to its fullest potential. The small space asks a unique question of perspective: paradoxically the smaller a space, the less of it can be seen at once, thus transforming our modes of perception into critical instruments of design.
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By confronting the spaces that pose the greatest limitations to our movement we understand how architecture reconfigures living from those very limitations. The scale at which the body cannot be simplified into generic dimensions will inform a more considered approach to scales where it can.

The impossibility of a micro-home imprisons of the body, appearing vulgar and beneath consideration of traditional formal theory. For the condensed mode of living that pursues extreme performance, its organization occupies overlapping and irrational proximities in space, between tables that fold away to fit the bed to storage hidden behind other layers of cabinetry. The orthographic mode of projection used to design these spaces fail to describe them post-occupancy. Traditional techniques of plan and section do not suffice to articulate the complexities of a space that wraps in on itself.
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Two models are displayed with a two-way mirror between: one model is the room as the architect sees it: pristine, precise and absolute. On the other side is the room as it is lived in post-occupancy. While both describe the same space, they have radically different readings. The reflection of one model is superimposed on the mirror with the other model, by using the same angles between the mirror and observer.
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Architects are perpetually concerned with the constant calibration of their world in an attempt to understand it all. In fear of an unsavoury association with aesthetics architects are often concerned by the geometric and mathematical buttresses that hold up their ideology. The methods of measuring and reproduction constitute a theory of representation that places the depiction of a space at the same or greater importance as the space itself.
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Unlike the symmetrical spaces of the Renaissance whose doctrine imports the logics of perspective, the micro-home is a typology inseparable from the body and can only be viewed through perspective. It is unfortunately always too close to the subject to be codified in orthographic projection, and the micro-home never exists without a subject—it is always understood in the terms of how one fits within it. Because of the asymmetry of focus within the micro-home that denies enumeration, it becomes a space of irrationality: it cannot be compressed any further without losing information, defining itself as the fundamental unit of living.

There is already a ubiquitous interpolation between real and perceived space within every home: the computer screen. It is what allows us to stay within the same 200 square foot room all day, what necessitates the repurposing of the bedroom once meant only for sleeping into the “everything” room. I made an interactive installation to question this new production of space. It’s a little hard to show through pictures, but a camera is pointed at the observer, which is connected to a face tracking script. This information is passed into Unreal Engine, where it changes the location of the scene’s camera in order to match the perspective of the viewer, creating a parallax effect where the render scene appears to be real, behind the projected screen.