habitable wall

For our final studio project of our first year, we were to design a "habitable wall," a seemingly impossible task at first. How does one live in a wall? This question never escaped my mind, and at first, I couldn't get my head around anything but a big flat and right angled dry wall with fold out amenities. Prior to this assignment, our class had focused on designed individual sleeping quarters for one person, based on the book Radical Simplicity by Dan Price, which opened up our minds to "strange places to sleep." But our habitable walls were to be more than "just" a place to sleep.

We were then given an artist client and told we had to include areas in our walls for entertaining/public, work, and storage as well as sleep. My client was Mark Rothko. When we split up into different groups and were asked to research our clients, I found that the parts that stuck out in Rothko's life were rather depressing, a complicated spiral downwards that eventually ended with his suicide in 1970. Although his life seemed somewhat tragic, Rothko had an amazing eye for color, layer, line, and depth in his work. This quote is one I chose to include in my final presentation- one that represents a theme I found when observing his work, and one that I really wanted to carry out in my wall design.

“The progression of a painter’s work…will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer…to achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.” –Mark Rothko


When our class took a weekend trip to Washington, D.C. about a month ago, I had the opportunity to see an actual Rothko painting in the National Portrait Gallery. Rothko's work was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Standing in front of it, I felt engulfed by the seemingly thousands of different layers of paint, a theme that hit me hard and became the main focus of my design for Rothko's wall. Rothko really did have that ability to eliminate all other obstacles besides the idea he wanted to viewer to see.


Sticking with the idea of layers, and being able to see hints of lots of other layers and things going on underneath, I started generating ideas of sliding, rotating walls on hinges, that would together create one continuous wall, but could be broken apart and moved for the different purposes. I chose red, yellow, and blue to define the different areas, and also to bring in the extensively layered yet simple nature of Rothko's work to my design, as these three colors are the most basic and can be transformed into thousands of other colors by simply mixing them together. Materiality and light started becoming big factors, and I started forming frosted colored glass panel walls, that would show lots of interesting shadows and change colors in the light. I felt that this idea of a kind of maze of walls, color, light, and shadow would be a good combination of themes that were important to Rothko himself, as well as his work.

This was my very first model, in which I began to lay out the separate areas, define wall heights and ways in which one would enter, navigate, and interact with the space. The colors for different areas here are the same I stuck with for my final- yellow for the entryway and public area, blue for work and display, and red for privacy.


Around this point in the model, we were told that they would be designed to go in the third floor of our studio space, and I immediately decided I needed my structure in a corner with windows, to allow as much light to filter through the layers of color as possible.

From this model, I progressed to a very similar layout with a few major changes. I returned to the sliding wall idea, and did away with a few awkward spaces in between some of the walls. The wall height differences also changed, I raised the red in the private area, so that as you are standing outside the space, you would be able to see hints of everything that was inside, but not too much. I wanted my space to invite you in like a maze, and keep you wondering what would be around the next corner, much like delving into a Rothko painting. Also in this next model, I made the addition of a large wood paneled wall (and a smaller sectional one), to balance out the delicacy of the glass and anchor it, creating a solid base, something my design was lacking. The large paneled wood wall was located on one of the window sides, and featured cut outs that were used for storage as well as creating interesting shadows, and blocking out some of the bright like from Rothko's more private work and sleep areas.


From here I moved on to my final design, in which I worked out a lot of the kinks and code restrictions my previous model presented. I added wall thickness to the wood, properly represented the glass panels and how they would be supported, basing my decisions off of the large paneled glass of the gallery space on the first floor of our studio building. I also worked out some of the problems with my large sliding door, settling on a smaller sliding panel leading into Rothko's most private area.



Here are a few more detailed photos of my final model.






And finally, my presentation board, for which we were split into groups where each person had a different client.