A pied-à-terre as permanent residence, Box/Box is an apartment for Snarkitecture partner Daniel Arsham. A 90 square foot private hideaway contained within a larger 2,500 square foot collaborative workspace, the project was conceived as an accelerated design/build experiment and was completed within a two-month period at a cost of less than $100 per square foot.
The selected site is an existing storage loft onto which the volume of the apartment sits like a gift balanced on a high shelf. Enclosed within this volume is a simple and economical program: a space for sleeping and dressing. A ladder at ground level leads upwards through a hatch concealed in the floor, entering a treehouse-like residence consisting of only a closet and a bed. A gradient of 25,000 spheres clad the walls, moving from dark to light as they meet the illuminated grid of the ceiling, made of translucent panels that reveal a hidden grid of spheres when backlit. This luminous ceiling, the skylight and the facing mirrors on opposite walls brighten and expand the room to create an illusory space that appears more expansive than actual size....more