GSD 1101 / Introduction to Design and Visual Studies in Architecture / Fall ’04

Scott Cohen, coordinator
Timothy Hyde
Jeannie Kim
Samual Lasky
Michael Meredith
Thomas Schroepfer
Marco Steinberg

Project #1: A Hidden Room

This project begins with an abstract plan diagram and the concept of a hidden room. The diagram locates space for a room that, in many respects, is already hidden. The problem is to add a means of access and a provision of light while controlling the degree to which the room becomes vulnerable to disclosure.

On the one hand, the question of concealment requires consideration of the relationship between the visual, experiential and conceptual bases of architectural knowledge. On the other hand, the diagram elicits the interpretation of a specific idea and the processes by which it is represented in architectural drawings and given three-dimensional form.

The project will focus on four distinct concepts of the hidden in architecture: visual concealment, i.e. optical obfuscation; hermetically sealed space that is, in a certain way, physically inaccessible from without; things presumed absent, according to conventions or expectations that would normally exclude them, but which are in fact present; and the representation of objects, structural or material properties or relationships, that are in fact not there.

The hidden involves the art of camouflage and surreptitious passage. It can be understood to relate to adaptive strategies adopted by certain species of plants and animals to protect themselves. In this sense, military art imitates the animal world. Meanwhile, knowledge of the programmatic implications of the hidden room may be provocative. The positive function of a hidden room, i.e., sanctuary of protection or privacy, can suddenly collapse into its opposite, a negative function, i.e., a space for kidnap, isolation, incarceration. In other words, a privileged realm of self-sovereignty can become an arrested space of total confinement. To hide, as a program in architecture, involves power, i.e., the control of space and by space.

In order to effectively conceal a room, perhaps knowledge of the entire building is deferred for both the inhabitants of the building and for the audience of its representations, i.e. the architectural critic. In other words, perhaps there will be no single plan or section that is capable of describing the entirety of the proposal. The dualities of the project (open/closed, public/private, exposed/hidden, transparent/opaque) will be played out as a result of the hybrid nature of the project and its programmatic coupling. Duality and tension can be subtly manifest or negated — able to be masked not only through modes of spatial communication, but also, by the apparent exterior massing and fenestration.

Givens and Constraints:

1. The given diagram represents an incomplete, inconclusive conceptual plan of four rooms. The gray rectangle represents the plan area of the hidden room.
2. The shape of the plan (proportion of the perimeter) is fixed according to the diagram. The shape of the gray area is not fixed. The scale relationship between the two is fixed. The hidden room must remain 4.5% of the whole.
3. Some — and if not, all — of the area of the four rooms as shown must be reduced in order to accommodate the hidden room within the perimeter limit.
4. Actual dimensions (scale), shape of rooms, thickness of walls, location of openings, and stairs or other level changes remain to be specified.
5. The ground and boundary context, roof and orientation may or may not be defined.
6. The maximum height of the proposal is no greater than half the length of the plan diagram.
7. Walls may be added but no additional rooms comparable to the four that are given.
8. There must be added two concealed means of access to the hidden room: one from the exterior and another from an interior room.
9. Each of the other four rooms is to be made accessible from two other rooms not including the hidden room.
10. A passage to the hidden room may be added. If the hidden room is not adjacent to the perimeter, the passage to it from the exterior must appear, in plan, to run alongside one of the four rooms, at least partially. The plan of the passage cannot be contained entirely within the gray plan area.
11. There must exist a plan in which no less than 75% of the boundaries of the four main rooms are maintained. The four rooms thus remain primarily independent.
12. At least 15% of the walls of the hidden room must have a minimum 5' high opening to a natural light source.
13. A maximum 25% of the plan area of the four given rooms may pass below or above another room.