Blank Stairs
Project: Design Research
Advisor: John Enright
Study of the componentless stair, pure form from the building.
The architecture is then, presented as the dichotomy between container and contained, background and foreground. The contained mass stems from the idea of object continuity, background cohesion and mass injection towards utilisation.
The mass, when absolutely necessary, creeps, shifts, and structures the foreground into existence, thus presenting people and their activities as the spatial point of focus.
By getting rid of the unnecessary, the decorative, and the frivolous, the mass is the connecting point of function - it flows out to become a rail, a step, or seating - and when its utility is no longer needed, the architectural gestures retreat back into their container, to their original blank state.
This idea of a new type of blankness proposes and assumes architecture as the struggle between background and foreground.
It at times purposely holds architecture in a state of pure blankness using an architectural container that is reductive and simple; this container holds and hides the architecture, which only flows out when absolutely required.
In computing, a layer is a way of hiding the working details of a subsystem, allowing the separation of concerns to facilitate interoperability and platform independence.
These generalizations arise from broad similarities that are best encapsulated by models that express similarities present in various specific implementations. The simplification provided by a good abstraction layer allows for easy reuse by distilling a useful concept or design pattern so that situations where it may be accurately applied can be quickly recognized
