The Humor Loft started out as not much more than a wide, L-shaped hallway with limited natural light – and ended up the same way, but different. Instead of clarifying the space, which was obviously a hopeless strategy, we decided to confuse the issue and trick the loft into thinking it had changed for the better.

This called for illicit, opportunistic measures and along the way we found ourselves satirizing some fashionable architectural preoccupations. The recent fixation on transparency and ambiguity got collapsed into a surreptitious optical system that multiplies the image of the loft’s few windows. On entering, you look down a dim corridor towards the bedroom door, a 14’ pivoting panel divided vertically in two. Through the clear glass at the top, you see the bedroom window, or rather, its reflection in a sideways periscope. At the bottom, you see the windows at the far end of the loft reflected in a one-way mirror.

Around the corner, the ubiquitous “topological surface” appears as a little indoor hill for the dining area (and tricycles), covered in green linoleum. Earth-colored panels on top of this bump lift off to access dead storage. The sort of domestic tumulus this creates reconnects the formal dramatics of topology with a modest symbolism.

The satire here was, clearly, an intellectual prop – but one that got us out from under conventional sensibilities to do instead what the absurd preconditions called for.