Shifting Scales

In this housing project located in Downtown Oakland, the primary interest is to change the sense of scale between domestic space and the surrounding urban context through the insertion of large and small scale subtractions. These operations are performed in the hope of providing wildly inverted experiences of two different groups of people: those who walk around the city and those living in it.

The project also plays with preserving some elements of the city, such as adjacent buildings and pedestrian traffic flows to the nearby BART station, while replacing others in the form of forceful subtractions in order to shift the scale of time within the city. The resulting voids also aim to place the domestic sphere on display within the context of Telegraph and Broadway avenues, a historic place of theater and entertainment.