After Rooms
Spring, 2026
Site Location: Typological (The Chicago Six-Flat)
Team: Gigi Knauf
Instructor: Marcos Parga and Omar Ali
JAMES A. BRITTON MEMORIAL AWARDS
Second Prize
Syracuse University SOA Undergraduate 2026 Thesis
Domestic space no longer relates to a post-colonial non-nuclear society and the plurality of people it serves. A standardized space designed for nobody. Even when occupants attempt to second-engineer their homes, one thing remains untouchable: the mechanical system - maintaining the divide between the human and the machine. But pull back the wall, and the hierarchy collapses. What was once hidden is now an active participant in daily life.
This thesis, After Rooms, restages mechanical domesticity. Domestic life becomes the daily negotiation with those forces, modifying and controlling them to adjust our comfort. New territories defined by mechanical gradients and heat, trace the patterns of daily life, marking where people cook, gather, walk, and rest. Instead of hiding systems, space organizes around them. After Rooms dissolves the static boundaries of domestic space and its distant relationship to the machine. In their place, new forms of living emerge. No longer defined by rooms or vertical mechanical stacks, but ones shaped by comfort, desire, and the shifting gradients of thermal and mechanical intensity.