Imaginary Dwelling

Architecture

Location: New York, New York

Competed during the Columbia GSAPP Introduction to Architecture Summer Studio, 2025

Instructors: Thomas De Monchaux and Yaqoub Hasan

This project was a collaboration with classmate Aman Desai to merge our two apartments in NYC into an “imaginary dwelling” space, using the concepts “roots” and “site lines” from our previous weeks’ project to unveil our new concept: “interconnectedness.”

The imaginary story that drove the design was that this imaginary dwelling unit was once a vertical standing tree, with staircases taking you up to the brances, where site lines converge. However, this tree falls down, becoming uprooted and useless. The staircases within the original trunk are now flipped and becoming a new unit of stairs that take you horizontally on your path. Through this concept, we created a complex and confusing model of connected staircases and rectangular apartment units, with small windows and doorways to promote site lines in an uprooted system. The base of the model is intentionally small, mimicking the way that a tree canopy would overhang, and emphasizing how nature and roots will prevail and find new ways, even if they are discontinued. Everything is interconnected.

A digital photocollage was used as a concept diagram for the narrative of a fallen tree system and site lines, pointing to how we explored our final model.

This floorplan and axonometric drawing is of my summer 2025 apartment in New York City. It was hand-drafted from measurements, and elements of this apartment were the inspiration for our further development of our imaginary dwelling.

These Rhino models combined the staircase element from Aman’s apartment, and “peep-hole” window element from my apartment to create the narrative of a fallen tree canopy system - our Imaginary Dwelling.