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by Zack Matthews (MArch ’17) — Recipient of Faculty Design Award MArch II

The purpose of this thesis is to retool the space of a contemporary social condenser through highly perceptual means, finding methods of spatial composition that enhance nonvirtual social exchange—a pleasure progressively inaccessible without technology. By what means does contemporary public space augment social transactions for a culture who now only needs a smartphone to do so? Upon revisiting the masterful perceptual distortions seen in 17th-century painting, these effects are abstracted and materialized as new possibilities for the interior collective space of the contemporary subject.