STRATA HOUSE

Strata House places users in a vertical datum distributing mixed realities and material form. Our world is almost entirely mediated by the digital. The term post-digital has been used ad nauseam to describe the blurred distinctions between what is digital and non-digital. Experiences are embedded in algorithms and neural networks perpetually operating behind the scenes to re-represent the world in the name of convenience, social interaction, and entertainment. Additionally, Mixed Reality (MR) technologies merge and blend our physical and digital objects in real-time. Strata House leverages these synchronous experiences through a tripartite organization: Roof - Plenum - Vault. Synonymous with a shield, the Roof absorbs the external environment projected onto it and protects the interior segments of the house. The Plenum contains the traditional public and private spaces, and the Vault is a subterranean cluster of voids housing MR environments. Strata House is contextual in a macro sense, appropriating our post-digital sphere as its site. This condition suggests that the two previously antagonistic models of the world (virtual and physical) are compressed to describe a modified relationship between domestic space and its architectural object. Strata House is an elaboration of this new relationship between experience and material.

The project imagines a house existing in two locations; an open-air residence depressed into the ground above, and underground vaults where users are enclosed by mixed reality technologies.