Hidden Room – Doubled Room

by Sean Nakamura Dolan (MArch I ’23)

The stairs offer an unexpected displacement of the body to an unexpected room by an expected condition that results from the process of copying.

This project works with the effects of duplication and the resulting conflation with the copy. The mirroring of the stairs results in a nested staircase with two rotationally opposite paths of circulation that connects vertically adjacent rooms. The copying of the building leads to a mirrored result in which the building is visually similar on the exterior yet utilizes the second axis to mirror the interior orientation of the rooms.

The differences between the copied building are resolved by an error in one of the stairs where one of the doubled entrances connects to a room in the copied building that is visually identical to the room the visitor will expect to be entering in the original building. This erroneous entrance is hinted by how the entrance is angled along the axis of the destination room.

The eerily familiar copied building has stairs that lead to the ground floor of both buildings, thus, potentially, the visitor may never realize that they had ever entered the copied building.