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house one - mechanicsi did some ’sketching’ last night trying to think about some of the ideas we were talking about in the introductory thread so i am starting a new post to share thoughts about the mechanics of the hider’s space. i am thinking this will be more ’spatial concepts’ than actual ‘deployments’ in a constructed arrangement of spaces. hopefully throwing some stuff in here will help when we actually start transcribing the life-scripts of the garcia-mortons.
this came through thinking of that condition in my own house and how it was able to keep me from discerning whether there was extra space just by trying to ‘figger’ it. i think the more separate the spaces are from each other the harder it is to compare visually. so if you are always entering contiguous spaces from opposite directions you are not able to understand the parallelism or lack of between them.
also, the more we utilise usable service elements in between them (storage, actual mechanical space, etc) the higher the level of comfort the inhabitant has with there ‘being something’ in between spaces. also, closets and stuff are less likely to lay bare their dimensions and they are harder to compare to one another for discrepancies.
i imagine that we will utilize… slight angles to maintain the expected continuity of size between exterior and interior faces of the bldg envelope.
inferno, when the guy with the feathered hairdo skulks around in the floor of the apartment building. i think the floor plenum space in a 2-storey house would be a good space to sneak around in and possibly use for ventilation for the hider.
this was a play on the kaufman house bearing walls and the ‘els’ scheme above. the chunky components are more distributed through the space than in fallingwater but i guess it would kind of depend on the siting. it seems like the hider would want a fairly even distribution so he doesnt miss any action!
thinking about saul’s matryoshka dolls. the first drawing is obvious with the hider occupying the space between layers, which could actually be one of the hollow bodies itself. im not really sure about the other drawing, i was trying to draw a kind of layered object that wasnt obviously layered so any gap in the experience would not be missed. i think it would be fairly obvious to have one of the doll pieces missing, unless it was the last one, and it was glued shut so you didnt know there was one more little one inside it.
could those graduated angles work in the ceiling or floor, as well? how many times have you walked across an acquaintance’s floor and commented ‘i think your floor is crooked’? i think people would not think twice about it in this old house. now they will think twice about josh frank laying under their feet, shooting some upskirts.
floor plenum space
no one in the world knows how thick a floor is supposed to be; perhaps some joists can be exposed in the house that are 18″ deep, where only 6″ are required. the family presumes that the floors are all supported by the deep structure in the hidden areas, based on the falsies that they have seen exposed.
i concur with your two recent posts. most of this time i have been thinking of really cool tableaux. an eye looking out of the priest hole, and now, vlado’s daughter with a ball rolling away from her on the seemingly flat floor with the hider visible in the tapering plenum space in a cutaway view below!
does he have a daughter? how do you know? how does he know??
another notion, similar to the tapering, or perhaps the bulking els: a room becomes gradually smaller as the hider expands his space. perhaps narrow wall at the end of a hallway is pushed out* a quarter of an inch every week, until he has a new space to inhabit.
perhaps this is impossible w/o doing noticeable damage, so it could be something that he has to enter the family space to achieve. when the family is at ralph’s, he replaces their kitchen cabinets with cabinets that are 1″ shallower.
*see the beginning of time bandits for a similar effect.
[quote comment="11869"]vlado’s daughter with a ball rolling away from her[/quote]
i thought he wanted to see his daughter before she turned 18 or something?
if the hider built the house in the first place would he need to go back and give himself more space? maybe he has been eating too many of the garcia-morton’s leftovers whilst they are watching the sunset from griffith park and he cant fit in his lurks anymore.
this study shows a repeated module that has a tapering wall and two corner openings built into it. the tapering zone provides some hider coverage and the overlaps obfuscate the interstitial spaces.
jt wrote:
> im wondering if ‘designing’ a real floor plan first is the way to go, or at least a bubble diagram, and then starting to nest the hider into it using some of these tactics?
hmm, i was thinking of the opposite strategy - to find the volumes that would be most suitable for hiding (one for sleeping, one for eating, cooking, self-pleasure, breeding british blues, etc.) then enveloping those w/ the family’s spaces. i imagine one would do this by configuring your tapering-l’s, then looking for spaces (or network of spaces) that are cut off from a would-be envelope.
perhaps, though, he would want the make the house as ‘normal’ as possible first, so as not to arouse suspicion, then see what he had to work with. to puzzle this out, you will need to be in-the-head-of-the-hider-in-the-house.
so you are saying to construct a sort of network that the hider would inhabit and then to fit the house around it? after having done the above study i would say i think it should be less of a modular thing.
the hiding-holes do not need to be networked, i suppose; the hider might find it more titillating to move from from module to module by running through the house behind the backs of the family.
would your modules operate in such a scheme?
they arent really modules in that last sketch. they are just spaces of various sizes for josh to hide in. the smallest would be probably coffin-sized, the largest would be for the british blue clowder. i think some of them should be networked but i dont guess they all need to be. also, i was trying to achieve a fairly thorough distribution so that he could get views of any spot on the property.
btw, the dashed paths would be in the attic or crawlspace.
can the modules be used to build out the ‘various sizes’; maybe the module is just the wedged wall?
nothing much; i was doodling cavities in modules based on the coffin you mentioned.
is the shaded part of the section the hider’s space or the garcia-morton’s?
the corner marks in the plans are site corners or envelope corners?
in planA02 (one storey), the corner marks are the envelope corners, i guess? in planA01 (a different storey), the lighter shade is the envelope.
in the section, the shaded area is the family space.
reposted previous comment to correct missing image link.
stuff to post shortly
take your time; we have 6 weeks!
these two images are translating your vocabulary into a net that sets up the geometries of the house, portions of it are infilled (hiderized), and then in the second image, a series of trapezoidal spaces are extracted from the hider spaces, maximum integration and maximum obfuscation. of course, actual programmatic concerns will need to be addressed in the execution of the vocabulary. these are plan diagrams btw, i think your drawings show the same sort of thing happening in section.
are the translucent trapezoids the unhidden, family spaces?
yes. they are only translucent because it looks cooler in the drawing!
[quote comment="11930"]yes. they are only translucent because it looks cooler in the drawing![/quote]
i think it should be a 2-storey house and i think the bedrooms should be upstairs. it may sound as though it is a reversion to your typical suburban home type, and i am not so concerned about the ‘public/private’ bs here. my reason is that when the hider is upstairs in km’s boudoir wearing her panties and reading her diary, and he hears the landrover pull into the driveway he needs adequate time towel off the hardwood and jump back into his hiding place.
additionally, i think the stairway should be a fairly tortuous affair so that if he is having to sneak back up the stairs and is being trailed he can stay only a few paces ahead without being visible.
jx, how did you research that scenario? did you pull a dennis hall?
ps, that last images has multiple levels: 1.master br, 2.brs, 3.lounge, 4.kitchen/dining.
put yourself in the mind of the hider!
4 levels? is that the whole program?
the levels aren’t stacked; the distance between the floor of one and the next would be enough for the hider to crawl or worm.
but is that drawing some kind of x-ray view of all floors at once?
x-ray
yes, the grey trapezoids are on different planes.
4 levels? is that the whole program?
i’m sure you already understand, but…
