EXTENDED USE / MERIT

Entry: L Residence, Omaha, Nebraska
Firm: Min | Day
Owner(s): Withheld at owner’s request
Photographer: Paul Crosby

This apartment for a filmmaker reinterprets the use of poché to support Baroque theatricality and proposes a cinematic architecture of sequences and points of view.  The use of “virtual poché” in the Baroque to hide service spaces and to create mystery and surprise is updated through a cinematic emphasis on thinness and surface instead of solidity and mass.

The apartment occupies the top floor of an 11-story Art Deco-era hotel converted to condominiums. We conceived the living space as a pseudo-exterior, pushing private and utilitarian spaces behind a large wall of Oak veneer – the inner façade of the unit. Above this is a private roof deck accessed from stairs in the compressed space of the poché.

This strategy of poché is evident in how we organized the plan: utilitarian spaces hug the inside of the L-shaped condominium. Bedrooms occupy the extremes of the L leaving a loft-like environment for work, everyday life and entertaining. To contrast the crisp wood wall, we treated other spaces with a volumetric application of color such as the “blue zone” of the virtual poché (spaces inhabiting the poché). Bathrooms and bedrooms have unique colors so that each space takes on its own personality.