Sosuke Fujimoto's residential conversion.

Oakland, CA

What happens where two rooms overlap?

This housing study translates a spatial strategy from Sou Fujimoto's work: rotate, shift, and overlap simple volumes to create varied relationships between rooms. The resulting prototypes explore how a home can offer both withdrawal and contact, using the spaces between cubes as carefully as the cubes themselves.

Three hand-drawn housing plans with rotated rooms and planted spaces between them — The first studies / Rooms in relation
The sketches test different ways for enclosed rooms and more open shared spaces to meet.

01 / Prototypes

Let the overlap become a threshold.

The cube provides a starting geometry. Rotation and displacement loosen its boundaries, making space for light, movement, and changing degrees of enclosure. Three housing prototypes test how those operations can shape the relationship between a private room and the common spaces of a home.

Three housing prototype plans with angled room arrangements and planted courtyards — 01 / Three domestic arrangements
The plans develop the sketched studies into distinct arrangements of rooms, openings, and spaces between them.

02 / Shared ground

Bring the prototypes into conversation.

The inquiry expands from the individual home to a cluster. When several arrangements meet, the gaps and shifts become part of a larger shared setting. The two drawings compare the organisation of occupied space with the geometry of the volumes above it.

Plan of several housing prototypes linked around shared open areas — 02 / A group of homes
Individual plans retain their differences while joining a larger cluster.

Plan showing rotated building volumes, roofs, and paths between the clusters — 03 / The spaces between
The gaps between volumes become as important as the rooms within them.

03 / The model

Give the plan depth.

The physical study brings the overlapping geometry into three dimensions. Openings, offsets, and changing heights translate the drawn relationships into places with different degrees of exposure. The model keeps the project focused on the domestic scale: how one space leads into another.

White physical models of the housing prototypes with projecting and overlapping cubic volumes — 04 / A study in enclosure
The models test the spatial translation from precedent to housing prototype.

Rotate / Overlap / Inhabit

A threshold can be a place.

The study uses geometric displacement to explore a spectrum between private rooms and shared life. Its architectural subject is the transition between those conditions.

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Location: Oakland, CA
Studio: UC Berkeley ARCH 201 Studio project
Instructor: Mia Zinni
Collaboration: Individual Work

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