Kianna Negron
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 defines a room as a unit within a gridded field. The dominant grid and placement of doors influences the placement of the high contrast and reflective surfaces that are used throughout the project. Each wall that is on the grid is white, walls are black when the grid is subdivided, and then it is glass whenever a wall is off of this module. One side of the glass is frosted, which blurs the view of the room while the other side is very reflective, allowing for the room to look as if it is extending. Wherever a door is placed, its size is reflected on the ground by the removal of the black ground pattern.
Winner of the 2022 Pella Fellowship Prize for Best Undergraduate Project