Thesis / 2024 - 2025
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Advised by Stan Allen
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The prevalence of digital display has disrupted the all-seeing-eye of the architect. We live in a triumph of image, where the eye frequently supersedes the body in the experience of living. Accelerated methods of reproduction and superimposition challenge our traditional perception of space in three ways. 1. Spaces are divided visually instead of spatially: the transitional corner for coats, the unkept mess under the table, the relax zone defined by posters, etc; a continuous folded surface replaces discrete spaces whose imagined potential exists only on the may-line. 2. Perspective becomes a tool to engineer experience: Contemporary image builds on renaissance perspectival distortions by replacing reality through synthetic production, from fake projections of the ocean on cruise ships to immersive karaoke bars where screens replace walls. 3. The inside is increasingly associated with the outside: the pursuit of space viewed out of the window persists from modernist doctrine to glass towers that unite urban and domestic. The orthographic mode of projection used to design spaces of living fail to describe them post-occupancy. The gap between design and experience commands us to interrogate the linkage between space and capital through the calculus of square footage. The invasion of the image creates a new possibility to reconsider how much we really need; a compression of space induces changes to the body to reduce its footprint and question how we are living.
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The womb is the original micro-home. It poses a question: how much space do we really need to live? At the same time it asks a question of representation: the sonograph is necessarily understood through section, an incomplete spatial flattening. And in architecture, the section’s clean lines and measured convictions render it incompatible with the idiosyncratic functions of life, so can we find a method that retains the messiness of post-occupancy? 60 rooms interpreted through 3D-scanning informed “x-ray” plans that reveal gradient boundaries between body and architecture. But orthographic projections used to design spaces ultimately fail to capture the overlapping proximities in lived experiences. New methods allow more nuanced interpretations: unrolled drawings describe a room through continuous textures and folds of space, and a virtual projection installation links architectural models with body movement and scale. 
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At the same time, the view outside the unit extends our experience within; we often associate a better view with a better price tag, so how much inside space would you exchange for outside space? Perceived and lived space are fluctuating currencies where, at a certain price level, the size of a unit becomes irrelevant relative to its location and view. The panoramic view must be privileged because by definition it must be higher than its neighbours, but what if we could design a building where everyone can have the penthouse view?
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The screen is an interpolation between real and perceived within every home. This interactive installation pursues a representation of space closest to how we really experience it: A camera captures the observer and processes the video feed in a face tracking program; using this position data, the location of a renderer’s camera in Unreal Engine changes to match the perspective of the viewer, creating a parallax effect where the rendered scene appears real, behind the projected screen. The exchange between real and perceived inspires a design hypothetical where space is in service of view: perhaps the quality of space can be improved through perception outside of the unit.
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In the second phase of this research, a thesis substituting square footage with image gains tactile detail through subversive design. The micro-home model for maximum performance and Archizoom’s continuous infinite plane collate into a system that compresses and expands to the extreme, while maintaining the same number of units per volume as a typical developer tower. In a challenge to real estate logic, this design is a utopian speculation that transforms each unit into narrow but tall slice, divided vertically between public and private visibility. The top layer is entirely transparent, allowing each unit to “borrow the view” from adjacent ones. By overlapping perception between units, more space is created out of thin air. The triple height space provides a pleasant environment where residents are visually and spatially connected with their neighbours through glass sliding dividers. Every unit now has a panoramic view. The enclosed bottom layer contains the minimum requirements for living: a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and dining area. Spaces gradually become shallow moving up the integrated staircase, creating a stepped profile that minimizes vertical space as needed by function, and increases light access for the units below. Operable panels that reconfigure space and allow sky-light from above divide the two layers within each unit. The top levels are no longer privileged over others—on the roof, only a surreal shared landscape for sports overlooks the city.
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Private layers constructed with mass timber panels cantilever from central shear walls and tension cables. Units acting as deep occupiable members eliminate obtrusive columns on each floor by directing load to the shear walls and facade columns, and the building core withdraws to the sides of the building to enable an entirely open plan for panoramic visibility. On private layers, a circulation corridor services each unit, while on open layers, communal functions coverage in the central band between cores. At the facades, diagonal members hang glass panels and a balcony for each unit. Amenity floors located every four floors and a recessed lobby define a segmented exterior massing. 
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Dropped strategically in Vancouver’s dense field of copy-paste developer towers, this project refutes an irrefutable typology by exactly replicating it. The same 100-foot square value-engineered tower seen around the world defining an urban no-place is characteristic of the Vancouverism movement. In one-third of the floors but three times as many units per floor, this project displays the extents of new possibility in a building type that seemingly already contains all that it can. At the same time, Vancouver’s intense view cone protection policy shapes a city through perspective and points of interest—a complementary backdrop for a tower defined paradoxically by that which is outside of its square footage.