City Specific Interiors:

700 Level Research Studio

City Specific Interiors: Environments of Light

Critic: Homa Farjadi

At the time when world cities proliferate across the globe with whirlwind speed, how can architecture make the spatial experience of each to remain specific? How can each city’s culture and geography be felt in its interior environments? Focus of this semester in the London studio aimed at articulating how light literally colors our experience of space by conditioning the physical space and our material perception of it. Lived experience finds coordinates in spatial representation, creating sensations of definition and dispersal, intimacy or publicity, density or transparency, interiority and exposure. In producing sensation of comfort, coziness, warmth, cool, shade, energy or calm, it can expand or contract scale, ‘emplace’ or’ displace’ sites, enclose, frame or engender flows.

With studio resident in London for the Fall semester we used the opportunity to have direct experience of this metropolis through analysis of physical spaces in relation to specific environments of light in its historic and contemporary spaces. In preparatory research for the design project the students analyzed specific urban spaces in public pavilions, art installations, markets, churches, train stations as well as a range of local and global architectural precedents in relation to the formations of light in their material space.