For this house bordering an alleyway on a traditional Chicago lot, Kwong Von Glinow flips the traditional residential section, arraying bedrooms on the first floor and living spaces on the second. This approach supports contemporary ways of living, emphasizing communal areas, interconnectivity, and flexible live-work spaces that receive ample natural light and engage the surrounding urban context.

A curved double-height atrium runs lengthwise from front to back doors, creating an interior courtyard that vertically connects the common areas on the first and second floors. Defined by a large picture window and a curving wall, the courtyard offers an informal multi-purpose area where residents can relax and their children can play.

The design of the home balances privacy and openness on the urban site. Off the courtyard’s curving inner wall lie all of the home’s bedrooms, pushed away from the alleyway towards the neighboring lot. The two bedrooms nearer the front of the house have windows that look toward the neighbor’s Chicago brick wall, providing privacy from the view of the street and neighbors. The primary bedroom suite is located at the back of the home, overlooking a private garden.

A stair tucked behind the courtyard’s curving wall leads to the second floor. The open plan is organized around four trusses that support the house’s Chicago balloon frame. These trusses distinguish five areas set around the curve of the balustrade: the kitchen, the island, the dining room, the powder room, and the living room. Throughout, a restrained colors and materials palette—white walls and white oak wood floors, trusses, and furnishing—draws attention to the qualities of the spaces themselves. All of the shared and public spaces on the second floor are oriented towards a ribbon window that spans the length of the interior courtyard. The 56-foot-long window floods the home with natural light and opens panoramic views that capture the fullness of the surrounding neighborhood: century-old trees, the back balconies and fire-escapes of neighboring buildings, and street lamps with their meandering cabling.

The exterior of the home engages the neighborhood’s traditional vernacular style while reflecting the organization of the interior spaces. The design shifts the facade hierarchy from the street to the alleyway, the most urban of the contexts. The street-facing facade has a row of half-height ribbon windows along the second floor and a single door on the first level, maintaining privacy for the front bedroom. On the alleyway side, floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor and a large picture window facing out to the alleyway from the interior courtyard open the interiors to the urban surroundings.

The exterior materials approach emphasizes the sectional flip and lends visual rhythm to the monolithic building. The house sits atop a concrete base with a dual-color Accoya wood rain screen system. The bottom half of the first level is clad in grey wood, while black wood lines the top half of the first level and all of the second.

Single family homes often take on the client’s needs and aesthetic requirements to create a tailor-made piece of architecture with the goal being a perfect space for the client to dwell in. Architecture becomes limited to the fine details, expensive material exploration, with perhaps some minimal room for spatial exploration of the house. All of the above are valid design routes, but the opportunity to design a single-family house for us focused our attention to understand how this generation is living, and how the next will live. The home no longer needs to fulfil a kitchen to prepare meals for families, or have enough domestic elements to make it as home-y as possible. Recently, Millennials - and, perhaps in the upcoming near future Gen Z (the generation leading the self-employment trend) are home-buyers for spaces where domesticity incorporates work, business, and connectivity. The fad-ish work-lives of a decade ago become an unquestionable domestic typology to revisit and accommodate for these generations living patterns.

Ardmore House is located on a typical Chicago block at the intersection of the alleyway with the street front. By flipping the programmatic status-quo of the typical domestic section, the kitchen, living, and dining spaces are now located on the upper level with greater daylighting and grander ceiling space with the bedrooms on the lower level where less light is required. The section now begins to prioritize the program within the home.

All architecture is borrowed. This vacation house is designed by two acts of borrowing in plan and in section. Scale, repetition, and difference make for the re-invention of these two borrowed architectural tropes.

Act I. Borrowing the Planar Organization
The program of the house no longer requires rooms separated by walls. Soft divisions persevere in contemporary lifestyle. Likewise, walls as load-bearing elements are replaced by steel channels in the envelope. Such is the liberation of the free plan in Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House. These homes are internally organized by the bathroom, utilities, and storage as shapely interior elements. Act I uses a “Storage T” as the internal organization and structure for the cantilevering roof.

Act II. Borrowing the Sectional Organization
The program of the house is organized by divisions understood in plan and in section. In the Muller House by Adolf Loos, he uses the home’s section to effectively borrow depth from another space beyond. The transition from one space to the next implies movement and vista. Borrowing from Loos and nature, Act II uses the raumplan to negotiate the slope of the site. Residents will ascend and descend within the home.

Towers within a Tower brings Hong Kong’s urban verticality into the apartment unit itself. Each apartment unit, typically inhabited as a horizontal slice, instead stacks each room of the apartment one atop the other vertically to create a unit tower. When the units aggregate next to one another, they produce shared outdoor spaces: a local neighborhood at every level. Read from both outside and within the apartment tower, residents can lay the claim “That’s my tower.”

While great variation can occur through these unit adjacencies, an economy of construction maintains three basic unit types: studios, one-bedrooms, and family units. Each of these unit towers are unique in their proportion, organization, and color, to serve the varying needs of each tenant type.

Each tower unit is composed of prefabricated concrete elements, which can be easily mounted onto each other with cast-­in steel­-plate embeds. The concrete frame is clad with colorful ceramic tiles, echoing the common construction material of residential towers in Hong Kong. The modularity of the system and minimal material weight allow for economic fabrication and flexible transportation. This system can be aggregated across scales, from a four­-story rural housing complex to a tower in the city: each time adapting to different ratios of studios, single bedrooms, and family apartments. As a system, the tower unit produces a new typology of residential ­living, where daily life is framed within pixels.

“Clean and tidy” were the only functional and aesthetic requirements given by our client. The status quo was not clean and tidy: cabinets, wardrobes, mismatched storage cabinets and boxes scattered all over the apartment.

The Storage T consolidates all of the household’s items within a storage system that is one with walls and doorways: storage becomes architecture. Rather than rely on part-to-whole storage products, the Storage T is an architectural device organizing the layout and contents of the apartment. As experienced, the Storage T unites the apartment through a series of thresholds, marking the entrance to and from each room.

When we imagine being in our home, we usually begin by navigating through it conventionally as we would when we are walking in the actual space. Without much thought, we can close our eyes and imagine effortlessly what we can do in each space or how to reach anything within. We think about these things without the consideration of barriers or effort. Our sequence of movement can be shuffled out of order so that we can skip from the downstairs kitchen to the upstairs laundry room. House XYZ does just this. It brings together all of the objects that make a home a place of domesticity – a bed for sleeping, a tub for bathing, a kitchen countertop for cooking, etc. The dimension of these items are human dimensions, made for daily use, which cross-culturally define our domestic routine of living.

House XYZ erases the architecturally imposed constraint of walls and floors and suspends our domestic items. A ceiling track inscribes in two dimensions the circulation that occurs three-dimensionally. “Rooms” are re-configured within a single volume by coordinates X, Y, and Z - an invisible raumplan - where everything is visually and spatially accessible. What can it mean to live in a house where in a limited area, every space can be used in any direction without obstructions such as corridors, thresholds, multiple floors, or even interior walls? Can we discover how the suspension of dimensions can create a new way of thinking about our lifestyle within a house?

The 3-Families House explores the model of a co-living community for three families as an alternative to mid-rise apartment blocks more commonly used in dense areas of the rapidly developing city of Shaoxing, China.

A distinct gable roof brings together the three families single articulated volume, that responds to Shaoxing’s historic urban fabric. The architectural language of the project seeks to transform housing into “an everything architecture”: landscapes, seasons, buildings, materials, etc. The structure accommodates a diversity of programs and a multitude of inhabitants within a single form.

The house is comprised of three distinct layers of program: a neighborhood daycare center on the ground floor; a communal dining area with individual vegetable gardens and private kitchens for each family on the second level; and, bedrooms for each family on the third level. A large horizontal opening along the long side of the house gives expansive views of the surrounding neighborhood roofscape. On this level, communal areas for dining and gardening bring the individual families together, while smaller dining and relaxation areas that are sectionally lower from the communal area create private nooks for each family. The bedrooms - a series of distinct smaller volumes for each occupant to call their own - receive light from the central atrium of the split gable roof and overlook the communal shared level below.

The Table Top Apartments responds to Mayor de Blasio’s priority placed on creating more affordable housing in New York City, by using both new sites and redeveloping existing sites. The housing crisis for the last two decades has generated a more and more socially disparate city, with the majority of NYC residents spending more than half of their yearly income on rent. The Table Top Apartments provides a housing solution based on the modular system of a “table top” which aggregates and stacks to provide density and diversity as a prototype for affordable housing in New York City. The system is not only flexible to accommodate the various lot sizes of New York City, but is also adaptable to various unit combinations, allowing for a diversity of apartment types.

The Table Top Apartments uses a system of modules based on the form of stacking table tops to generate affordable housing as 4-story walk-ups, piers, towers with setbacks and cascading balconies, and even superblocks. This system emerges from the use of a few simple modular elements which aggregate to create a new mode of living. The concept of the module is taken from a table top with four legs where the table top or slab is shaped as either a circle, square or rectangle, and the table legs or columns serve as the building’s structure and space for vertical services. The post-and-slab table top units stack and aggregate, creating different combinations of unit-types to emphasize the project’s assertion that diversity paired with density makes for a healthy and sustainable living environment. A simple storefront glazing system mediates between the interior of the units and the exterior, while private spaces and bathrooms are enclosed in wood cabinets.

The use of three different table top shapes, which are deliberately misaligned when stacked, create apertures in the slab between units. The resulting vertical courtyard space forms a realm that serves as space for public circulation, bringing in light and air. The spatial juxtapositions of The Table Top Apartments generate a new way of living in affordable housing that is dense, diverse, open, and light.

The theme Designing a Better Chicago acknowledges that our city is constantly evolving: it is never static and it never stops imagining a better version of itself. Likewise, its people are ever on the move. Our approach for this project began by understanding the relevance of this prompt and how Designing a Better Chicago can affect the public who experience the city.

"Room 6" is an amazing site in the center of Chicago, surrounded by magnificent architecture along the lively and dynamic Riverfront. While numbered as the final room along the southern edge of the Chicago Riverwalk Masterplan, the site actually holds its heritage as the central hub of Chicago’s maritime industry, originally planned to be formalized by 3 bridges to shape its centrality as a confluence. The question we asked ourselves when given this site was: what more can we give to this site as architects? We propose a design that offers time and space, titled “Give me a minute, please!”

One minute can seem very short, but at the same time one minute can seem very long. A minute is relative. “Give me a minute, please!” can be interpreted in many different ways. This phrase often translates as a way to ask someone to wait. It almost always means a short amount of time and not literally a minute. For our society which demands spontaneity, on-the-go, everything-all-at-once, one minute is often broken up and doled out to various and competing focuses. What if the city can offer that minute back to the public to enjoy? The best designed public spaces never dictate or manipulate the visitor to use a space in a certain way. They allow visitors to explore and discover with time. Give me a minute, please! offers a space for contemplation: a respite - even if knowingly momentary - where visitors will pause, delight, and enjoy their surroundings.

Robert Burnier’s largest structure of his 2018 series “Black Tiberinus” anchors itself to the Riverwalk foundation piles. At 19’x19’x31’, the sturdily held nylon mesh and rope artwork gracefully play out soft movements of color and shadow within the structural framework. We approached this structure as a “found object” on the site, with the ambition to extend the use of the existing artwork.

A neighborhood sauna demands privacy for the sauna-goer, yet the building demands publicness for the community. Block Sauna 143 is a neighborhood sauna that articulates publicness and privacy through a deliberate tectonic system.

The path to the sauna initiates from the neighborhood sidewalk down a submerged ramp, leading visitors toward an open-air courtyard. A cafe along the street-front encourages neighborhood pedestrians to access the building. Visitors get a glimpse of the publicness of the building through a band of clerestory windows that cut through and wrap the entire building.

The sauna-goer first arrives at the central courtyard. Colored skylight boxes act as a way-finding device to navigate the sauna-goer. There are two sauna sequences: each sequence connects the vestibule, locker room, toilet room, shower room and sauna room through an enfilade. The private sauna sequence is marked by the thickness of walls between each of the rooms. The sauna-goer experiences the walls becoming thicker and thicker until they reach the sauna room. These walls provide a sense of enclosure and privacy for the sauna-goer to enjoy.

The tectonic of the building comes from three elements: Wall, Column, and Roof. The concrete walls are submerged into the earth to provide enhanced thermal performance for the building. The columns are made of four steel pipes that hold the roof. The architecture of Block Sauna 143 curates its space from buildings elements, order, and proportion.

The beach is the original commons, a public space at the edge of the city and ocean, open for all to enjoy. PS1 MoMA YAP offers the opportunity for a new interpretation of its courtyard as that original common - a public beach commons for relaxation and playful recreation. With this in mind, we propose Beach Party for the 20th edition of PS1 MoMA’s Warm Up.

Beach Party! is a timely response to local challenges that New York Beaches are facing. Indispensable in storm protection against rising sea levels, New York’s beaches struggle to maintain themselves naturally from continuous erosion. Beach Party! brings the joys of New York’s beaches, as well as awareness of the challenges that they face, right into the heart of Queens. The architecture borrows from the familiar as a way to speak to the collective, to memory, and a common understanding. Beach Party! borrows the four most familiar elements of the beach to bring New York’s coastal periphery to the museum in the urban center: sand, water, swings, and a bouncy ball.

Transplanting five of New York’s beaches into the museum’s courtyard, visitors will revel in the distinctive sands of New York’s coastal periphery spread across the courtyard. Suspended above these sands is a 160 foot long Group Hammock spanning between a transverse beam at the courtyard’s entrance and extending the full length of the courtyard to the museum’s podium. An oversized Beach Ball bounces between the overhead beams. And lastly, the only element that sits on the ground, the Looped Pool cast from sand aggregates from the five New York beaches offers a 6” wading pool to cool off and experiences the delight of water under the sun.

At the opening of Beach Party, sand from Far Rockaway, Long Beach, Fire Island, Jamaica Bay, and Westhampton will form a striped groundscape, each distinguished by colors and textures unique to their original beaches. Over the course of the summer, the strips will mix and merge as visitors frolic in the sand, their communal play erasing divisions and creating an ever-changing sandscape. An estimated 5,000 cubic yards of sand is sufficient to cover the courtyard to a depth of 6” - less than 0.05% of most beach sand reclamation projects in New York.

Overhead, three truss beams float above the Beach, their shadows suggesting three ‘zones’ below while leaving the Beach a single, unfettered space. An oversized Beach Ball sits in one zone, and the Looped Pool in another. The third, largest space can be used for large-scale performances, both by itself and in conjunction with the rest of the Beach.

Two of the three truss beams bridge the museum’s podium entrance to a third, shorter beam connecting the ensemble to the surrounding walls. The two longer beams carry between them the bright orange Hammocks - a nod towards ubiquitous beachfront construction fencing. Besides sand below and steel above, Beach Party utilizes ‘rope’ recycled from plastic bottles to weave both the Beach Ball and the Hammocks.

Whether ensconced in the Hammocks, dipping feet in the Looped Pool, rolling around the Beach Ball, or leaving notes for strangers in the iridescent dunes, revelers will enjoy a piece of New York’s oldest commons without leaving the city - their most relatable summer activity. By borrowing these elements, we seek to share the beach experience within the city.

As New York braces against rising tides, Beach Party is a timely, if ephemeral, reminder that we should never take one of its most precious public spaces for granted.

Traditional yet Transformative
A staple of classical Chinese architecture, the Moon Gate captures lush garden landscapes within its circular frame. Inspired by the Moon Gate’s duality as both a gateway and a window, the Chinatown Gateway takes on the new form of a circular archway. Standing 48’ tall, the circular archway transforms the traditional paifangs (or gateways) greeting visitors to Chinatowns around the world into a unique form - the universal symbol of inclusion and harmony. Balancing respect for Chinese design heritage while serving an expanded role as a marker not just for Chinatown but Lower Manhattan at large, the Gateway captures the everchanging streetscapes of Chinatown and its vicinity within its portal.

Iconic yet Welcoming
Nestled within the circular archway is seating for 40 persons, a performance space, and a garden containing the 5 Gingko trees currently on the urban site. The archway is monumental without sacrificing humanism: too often, “iconic” public spaces intimidate rather than accommodate. With bleacher seating for 20 on either end of the loop, the new Gateway creates a lightly sheltered plaza for cultural events – the kind of space that Chinatown has not enjoyed for decades. Immediately iconic, the Gateway’s distinctive silhouette also serves as a wayfinding beacon bridging Chinatown and Little Italy. Located within the triangular plaza are two totems that combine the standard WalkNYC wayfinding displays.

Flexible and Efficient
Eschewing pre-determined programming for flexibility, the Gateway is future-proofed against obsolescence. Arrayed along its underside are hooks from which banners, lanterns, and other devices could be hung from. This activates the Archway throughout the year, from the Spring Lantern Festival to the Mid-Autumn Festival, allowing it to host a wide range of events. While simple, the archway is not low-tech: Embedded on its outer surface are cost-effective but crowd-pleasing interactive lighting system that responds to visitor’s motions via an app. The Gateway thus becomes more than a gate to Chinatown but an interactive destination unto itself.

Cultural History and Collective Future
The Chinatown Archway draws upon cultural history in order to look towards our collective future. It is a new urban icon that does not merely mark the entrance to Chinatown but stands as a unifying beacon for the all of Lower Manhattan including Tribeca to the west, Little Italy to the north, and the Lower East Side to the northeast. At the intersection of many converging paths, the Chinatown Gateway will serve as a lasting icon to celebrate the various cultures that have contributed to this vibrant community.

The story of the Pavilion in the 21st century is one of short lives and even shorter attention spans. Yet it compels us to draw upon nature’s primary forms to create lasting public space. In West Kowloon, we return to the familiar yet rich language of pure geometries. Harkening to Laugier’s Primitive Hut, we envision our pavilion as a deep roofscape set upon elemental columns, harboring man between earth and sky first at West Kowloon and, in the future, at other parts of Hong Kong.

The Primitive Pavilion sets one triangle and two squares upon three circles to create a free-flowing space in West Kowloon’s Cultural District that bridges Nursery Park to West Kowloon Bay. A deep roofscape, composed of these six primary geometries intersecting one another, casts a kaleidoscope of color and light upon on a soft landscape surfaced with recycled rubber. Five columns supporting these intersections curate a wide range of activities, from community workshops to group exercises. For large scale events, the open plan allows audiences to spill over to the lawn and plaza. A universally accessible, the Primitive Pavilion is naturally ventilated and completely shaded by its deep roof.

A kit-of-parts construction allows its six primary geometries to be reassembled efficiently in other locations across Hong Kong. Clad in weathering perforated metal panels on a welded steel structure, the Primitive Pavilion is designed as a modular system that will last for generations. Nursery Park is only the first step in its long life: a kit-of-parts construction allows its six primary geometries to be reassembled efficiently in other locations across Hong Kong. At each of its future homes, the Primitive Pavilion assumes a new life: Whether as installation art in the M+ Museum or an urban landmark at Times Square, its programmatic flexibility coupled with material longevity ensures that it will continue to create enjoyable public spaces far beyond its original lifespan.

In the Loop is an ADA ramp shaped as a rhombus set on the lawn of San Antonio’s City Hall. Three ramps lead one from the plaza up to City Hall. A staircase occupies the fourth side of the rhombus, offering direct access to City Hall. Ramp and stair converge to touch City Hall at a common landing, creating a grand entrance for all. Set within the rhombus is a circular clearing that can be activated for various community activities - in the tradition of the Plaza de Armas. Through research and site visits, we were struck by City Hall’s evolution over the century. Whereas its last major addition had resulted in the removal of its tower and corner turrets in 1927, the design for In the Loop does not remove a single existing stone. Per preservation guidelines, the ramp has minimal contact with City Hall’s limestone façade and differentiates itself materially and visually through the use of a lightweight metal structure. Constructed of metal grated surfaces on a structure of T-beams, the ramp's surface lets in sunlight to the lawn below, and allows visitors continued visual access to the original staircase - of which less than 30% is partially covered.

The addition of an accessible approach to City Hall’s east entrance offers an opportunity to enliven the Plaza de Armas in its traditional role as the heart of San Antonio. In the Loop creates a new public space combining ADA accessibility with a strategy of universal design, augmenting the Plaza de Armas and City Hall as a public space for all to enjoy.

Chicagoans are passionate about their city, the beautiful Lake Michigan, and even their highway - the famous Lake Shore Drive. Grand Lattices seeks to intensify the experience of Lake Shore Drive by providing pedestrians access points to viewing decks above Lake Shore Drive - offering new vantages that bridges the Lake and the City.

The north- and south-bound lanes of Lake Shore Drive often split, creating an in-between space that is open to above. This in-between space is the opportunity that gives pedestrians a vertical access point above Lake Shore Drive by inserting a lattice structure above. For the first time, the pedestrian can enjoy views between the lake and city above Lake Shore Drive.

Each underpass along Lake Shore Drive is marked with a unique and singular form as a viewing deck, serving as a landmark and icon to access the waterfront. From many blocks away, the lattice structure at each underpass serves as a signal that the lakefront is just beyond.

Chicago is known for its post-and-beam, steel-frame construction which provides the bones for all of the magnificent buildings in the city. The open-lattice viewing deck structures take on the fundamental, bare bones of steel-frame construction without the need of a facade. As seen from Lake Shore Drive, the lattice structures serve as successive landmarks for the underpasses below.

The new Swiss Consulate Chicago brings a domestic language to the office interior at the Hancock Tower. As a collaborative design project between Swiss Architecture office HHF and Chicago-based practice Kwong Von Glinow, we took inspiration from Swiss-born Architect Otto Kolb who taught in Chicago at Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1960s to link the two cultural architectural histories of Switzerland and Chicago. As such, Villa Kolb - the architect’s primary residence - espoused organic geometry and fluidity in the home’s architecture, allowing for a succession of spaces that flow between one another. Similarly, the Swiss Consulate Chicago is organized around a “Green heart” at the center of the space where the staff gather together and from which all of the consular program is visible and accessible.

Surrounding the Green Core are the office spaces, a conference room, and support areas. The Green Core creates a soft division within the Consulate between the social areas and the working areas. Curvilinear built-in benches and a kitchenette mediate the two programmatic areas. The light filtering curvilinear elements allow for a soft contrast between the organic geometry of the Green Core and the abstract furniture of the working areas. The repetitive vertical slats of the curvilinear walls emphasize the verticality of the 14’ tall exposed ceiling. The frosted glass of the enclosed offices and the conference room further emphasize connection between all areas of the Consulate and give added depth and light to the space. The General Consul’s office is marked by its signature furniture and adjacency to the open working are through the translucent glass.

Surrounding the Green Core are the office spaces, a conference room, and support areas. The Green Core creates a soft division within the Consulate between the social areas and the working areas. Curvilinear built-in benches and a kitchenette mediate the two programmatic areas. The light filtering curvilinear elements allow for a soft contrast between the organic geometry of the Green Core and the abstract furniture of the working areas. The repetitive vertical slats of the curvilinear walls emphasize the verticality of the 14’ tall exposed ceiling. The frosted glass of the enclosed offices and the conference room further emphasize connection between all areas of the Consulate and give added depth and light to the space. The General Consul’s office is marked by its signature furniture and adjacency to the open working are through the translucent glass.

With limited horizontal space, Dizzy’s design concept boldly curates an interior vertical experience through both planned and unplanned spatial experiences. Dizzy’s SoHo is organized sectionally into four distinct, yet connected levels. Curating a sequence from casual to formal, spontaneous to planned, and revealed to concealed, each level customizes a spatial experience, creating a mosaic of episodes within the building.

Beginning on Ground Level, Dizzy’s SoHo invites its patrons into its back of house - to the heart of the Omakase Kitchen itself. Ascending, patrons can stop off into the Music Box, which links all of the upper levels together acoustically. Above, the Gallery overlooks the Music Box and is lined with plush lounge furniture and artwork. Finally, above it all, the Loggia offers 30 exclusive seats to experience the Omakase menu and live music from below.

The material palette for the project is composed of a series of custom designed vertical textures. The combination of material choice with texture creates unique atmospheres with light reflecting differently from each of the textured surfaces. Dizzy’s material palette incorporates patterned artwork, metal, glass, wood, and formed plaster.

Kwong Von Glinow was awarded the Architectural League Prize of New York for their 2018 theme of Objective. The prize is awarded from a yearly juried portfolio competition for young architects and designers ten years or less out of school.

Funded by a 2019 awarded Graham Foundation Grant to individuals, the Smuggling Architecture installation at the Swiss Architecture Museum optimistically smuggles meaning and value into the interiors of generic suburban house plans through architectural orders.

The paring of “smuggling” and “architecture” together is purposeful. The connotation of “smuggling” presupposes that what is secretively being smuggled is something that is small enough that it is easily hidden. By contrast, architecture seems a little bit too big as an idea to be smuggled. The word smuggling provides a new and alternative approach to the act of designing.

Over half of all Americans live in suburbia, and of those in suburbia, ninety-eight percent live in homes developed by off-the-shelf builder’s plans. The history of the suburban house has been and continues to be codified in a handful of builder's manuals that offer a huge selection of home plans to pick-and-choose buyers. These builder homes are living artifacts: a domestic typology rigidly embedded within the American landscape. Smuggling Architecture seeks to reclaim the suburban housing stock that has been neglected by modern architecture.

Crowns is an installation at Volume Gallery that reinterprets crown molding as a series of four spatial sculptures. Building upon research from the Smuggling Architecture exhibition, Crowns liberates crown molding from its context within the suburban home. As visitor enter, four over-scaled constructs occupy the large gallery, tracing the domestic seams of the suburban home. The significance of crown-molding in the everyday house is two-fold: 1) crown molding presents itself as a domestic aesthetic; and 2) crown molding acts as an eraser for builders to cover-up unnegotiated details. These are the same reasons why crown molding has been ignored by modernism. In this installation, crown molding no longer acts as the cosmetic for a joint, but rather exists independently, tracing seams to become the object itself.