STUDIO OVERVIEW
In 1962 the British self-proclaimed surrealist science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard wrote a short story titled “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista.” It tells the story of Howard Talbot, a young lawyer who buys a so-called “psychotropic house”—a house that through specific types of deformations of walls and ceilings responds to its inhabitant, profoundly altering his moods and desires. It soon becomes clear that the house has absorbed many of the psychological traits of its previous inhabitant, a famous movie star named Gloria Tremayne, who murdered her architect-husband after a bout of madness. As the story unfolds, Howard falls in love with Gloria, who attacks Howard’s wife and chases her out of the house, leading the lawyer and his murderous robot-house to an inevitable climax.
The studio uses Ballard’s short story to investigate a wide range of questions about inhabitation. What space do we actually inhabit, and what is the space technology inhabits? If we answer these questions with Louis Kahn’s distinction between “served” and “servant” spaces in mind, we could say that all houses are double houses. And doubling is inherently ambiguous, the reason why the monsters in science-fiction movies always enter via the ducts and sewers. It’s also why, as children, we play in the attic, in the closets and under the bed. But also why ghosts always enter through the poché—we architects draw the space behind the walls and ceilings as solid, but nothing is less true: allhouses are haunted ... While we play games with architecture, it plays its own games with us.
In short, we are going to liberate the poché and explore the enormous possibilities for design to balance the relationship between the two forms of space. This can be achieved by classical means, by literally deleting rooms and increasing the undefined space behind the walls; it can also be achieved virtually, by loading space with electronics and robotics. Either way—and anything in between.