Outré

In collaboration with David Ma.

Winner of The Director’s Choice Award, Home Competition 2020

Advisors: John Enright, with Leila Khodadad

The home, along with its elements is deemed as one’s most comfortable environment, where interactions between the occupants and the elements occur repetitively over the span of one’s time in it. Therefore, routinary interactions with the architecture and the objects of the home get embedded in one’s subconscious, rendering usages of domestic elements nearly thoughtless. This is reinforced when the spatial distinction between one’s work and home is forcibly blurred due to the pandemic. The project, therefore, starts as an investigation of how the architecture of the home has become a part of one’s background, especially in the age of digital invasion.

The project then responds by using one’s subconscious relationship to the background against itself. Through borderline eccentric/absurd architectural upcycling of pre-existing elements and spaces, the “Home” is pulled out of one’s subconscious routine associated with how it was once used. By this questioning of the use or misuse of the existing architectural language of the “Home”, we simultaneously question those specific elements as to their function and meaning, and attempt to create an architecture that outlasts strict definitions, and engages beyond rote functionality.

An Architectural background/foreground that now one has to adapt to.