Olivia Lewis
Society of Rooms
From third-year undergraduate studio Society of Rooms.
Faculty: Stewart Hicks (coordinator), Abigail Chang, Chris Frye, Palmyra Geraki, Thomas Kelley
About the studio:
The room is the basic spatial unit of a building and carries a wide array of definitions, associations, and meanings. The architect Louis Kahn famously defined the architectural plan as a “society of rooms.” This was a challenge to modernist spatial ideals of fluid connectivity in favor of a more unitized aggregation of easily definable and delimited elements. This conception shifts the scope of architecture to privilege the parts over the whole and the discrete over the composite. This studio interrogated the room for its potential to structure human occupation, experience, furniture, and decor. While doing so, it aimed to produce designs for buildings that synthesize collections of rooms into a coordinated whole.
About the project:
This project explores a room being defined by an intensity of color and texture that is governed by the amount of time one spends in the space. A spectrum of bright red and wall texture is imposed onto the program of each specific room. Rooms that are inhabited for short periods of time such as staircases, bathrooms, and reception areas are coated in a shiny, vibrant red that overwhelms the senses. Rooms that encourage visitors to stay for longer periods of time including outdoor spaces, art studios, and galleries have softer shades of reds and pinks as well as heightened texture on vertical elements.
Winner of the 2022 Susan Nealey Scholarship Award and Kevin K. Pierce Scholarship Award for outstanding third-year undergraduate project