Location: DTLA, Los Angeles
Type: Commerical
Design Team: Katy Barkan, Michael Deprez, Eric Wall
Date: 2018
This projects explores a constellation of stairs that reside somewhere between being an object and a building, as well as between being a drawing and a space. This is a strange object that is simultaneously within and without, flickering between being somewhere and being nowhere—it is a physical construction in plywood and paint, yet it sits side by side with its graphic shadows. Designed as a fit-out for a new media office, the project proposes a compact and idiosyncratic architectural object to loosely organize an otherwise open office plan. The object is made up of 3 dimensionally and programmatically specific stairs, designed to accommodate, a team meeting area, a conference room, a phone booth, a kitchenette, and an eating area. The particular arrangement of parts proposed a range of possibilities and spatial types—from more compact organizations to more convoluted ones that claim more or less of the surrounding territory for specific programmatic use. The loose elements of the stairs are fixed in place by the material reification of the projected shadow in paint and carpet—turning drawing into building and building into drawing. In locating the stairs as a singular bundled object, the project assimilates the scale of the body and the scale of architecture into one. A metonymy between the figure of architecture and the figures occupying it.