The first floor in this proposed three story brownstone, was to be set aside as transitory housing for impermanent residents. In an attempt to get a grasp on the creation of spatial forms that would create “good” relationships amongst these different families, I looked to Rudolf Arnheim. In 1976, Arnheim in his book, Visual Thinking, attempted to connect the way in which people perceive abstract concepts. He wanted to give form to concepts such as the past, present, and future, as well as good and bad relationships. Through successive experiments, he gave groups of students the task of drawing these concepts using only line drawing. The types of drawings that were created for the relationship portion of the test, illustrated varied results. One student illustrated a set of parallel lines. These lines spoke to the way in which two people should remain with each other, yet not over power each other. They must overlap but in some sense remain separate. Another student produced an illustration of a rigid line paired with a curvilinear, closed loop. The rigidity of the former was said to represent the ups and downs in a bad relationship, and the latter was a depiction of a smooth expression of time.
These apartments were designed thinking about the spatial implications of Arnheim’s studies. The spaces which were broken up for varying degrees of privacy, overlap in some areas but remain consistently separate in others. The partitions were also put in place in order to promote a sort of “parallel” lifestyle for these families, so their relationships can begin to intertwine for their betterment. The Partitions were created through the abstraction of two parallel lines, which in turn create curved spaces carved out of the original volume in a way that is meant to be conducive to a continuous, fluid existence.
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