WEDGING: AS ORTHOGRAPHIC PROTOTYPE

Wedge: to force something into a narrow gap so that it is held tight by pressure from the surrounding surfaces; to set the soft against the rigid so that each is shaped by the other’s resistance, as when a billowing form swells against a primitive edge.

This series of three orthographic plans explores wedging as a means of producing architectural form, space, and function. Moving from rectangle to circle to square, each plan’s primitive outer boundary is put into contention by soft, semi-rigid, billowing forms that compress and expand against it. These relaxed forms build tension between adjacent spaces: as one volume presses into another, it disrupts conventional alignments and provokes new relationships between form and space. Wedging extends beyond a formal operation to become a method for producing ambiguity, dissolving the boundaries between the interior and exterior, as well as conditioned and unconditioned space. Its flexibility also carries into program, as each plan becomes a prototype for the bathhouse and sauna as an architecture of gradients, where bodies move through shifting thresholds of heat, steam, cold plunges, and enclosure, and where the space between things becomes as inhabitable as the things themselves.