FRUSTRATION

The second project is not as fulfilling as the first one. The designing process become a constant bargain between me and the studio instructor. Every time I spend hours and hours doing something, she will discard it and simply redirect me to do something that I think I did. I tried to follow her instruction completely, but even so it turned out that it is not what she really wanted, and I will have to return to the original point. It is really frustrating and I do not think I got enough attention and instruction during the process. At the same time, the incentive to produce drawings and models are discouraged due to the fact that she is not demanding anything concrete but rather toggling back and forth between what I had and what I have now. IT IS NOT MOVING FORWARD!

Ok, so I will loosely define my hidden here:

IT IS about negation of expectation, or hide the truth/next step/room until the end of the passage.
The hidden room in the middle is simply a room of passage, not a room of dwelling, and it connects the.

Her being prescriptive makes the progress really hard and I am always interrupted in my own thinking in terms of work flow. Now what happened in the previous project happened again, and I think we are still having communication difficulties.

HIDDEN is the ramification of intentional concealment, which comes in package with unintentional revealing. It is a game between the deception of the architect and the false expectation of the occupants. In the end, revelation should be achieved through one or a series of negations of such expectation. I would illustrate the hidden with some twists near the end of the dwellings.

In this design, two diamond shaped volumes intersect with each other thus creating an suspended space in the center which looks like it is standing on a single point. No one would assume there is space on top of that point, and this is the common expectation. Therefore the encounter of the central volume is a negation of dwellers' expectation and it is by definition assumed to be hidden. The suspending effect is further accentuated by the repetitive and puzzle-like qualities of the four rooms around it, as well as the transparency created through the cracked openings that can be seen through.

To access the hidden room: Circulation is hidden within the walls, and only at the end of passages can the dwellers know what is in store around the corner. The ascending grand stair from exterior is a cue to the hidden elevated space, but people can only experience the volume without seeing it until they come down to see the volume through the crack near the end. Then people will descend down to the other rooms on the floor (interior access), the hidden space become hidden again.