Malleable Space

Charged with the task of devel­op­ing a con­tem­po­rary villa archi­type, these 3 mod­els rep­re­sent the the­ory of mal­leable space.  Each model rep­re­sent a moment in time of a con­tin­u­ously trans­form­ing space — a sin­gle occu­pant pod for liv­ing.  Sit­u­ated in the north Atlantic Ocean, the pod’s enve­lope recon­fig­ures in response to pro­gram, struc­ture, and envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns.  When the pod encoun­ters rough water, it closes up and pro­tects the inhab­i­tant.  As the seas calm, the envelop grad­u­ally opens.  This mal­leable archi­tec­ture ques­tions the con­ven­tional space plan­ning phase of design where func­tions are sep­a­rated into mul­ti­ple rooms for­ever ded­i­cated to a sin­gle pur­pose — bath, kitchen, bed­room, liv­ing…  In these pods, you don’t change spaces to per­form dif­fer­ent func­tion, the space changes in response to your func­tion cre­at­ing a rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship between the occu­pant and the envelope.

These scale mod­els are con­structed from the same geo­met­ric prin­ci­ples researched in the mal­leable foam research project.