Envision, if you will, a jungle. Hot and dense, reaching as far as you can imagine. Now instead of massive tree trunks all around, there were buildings. Concrete and steel monstrosities, stretching ever skyward into infinity. And those thick groves of foliage you are hacking through with a finely-crafted blade? Really, they are thick crowds of pedestrians, streaming to or from work. They would trample you before they even looked at you, and their apathy does not even compare to the predatory attitude of taxi cabs, roaring along the rivers of pavement.
If you happened to seek shelter in one of the aforementioned buildings, and it also happened to be an apartment building, what would you find? A jumble. A maze of hallways, where each doorway leads to a room that looks not unlike the one you stumbled into a few seconds earlier. The only evidence that it is in fact NOT the same room is that the color of the decorative vase by your hand is red instead of copper. But the identical walls and doors, all flat, crisp drywall painted that lovely shade of “frosted alabaster,” serve only to direct spatial flow. You move, hit a barrier, change direction, repeat. Nothing about these stamped out dwellings invites a feeling of free will, or of having a choice.
Room after room flashes before you, until the images blur together into a kind of grotesque animation, where the foreground shifts like a time-lapsed tour through a modern art gallery, and the background is constant. The whole world swims before your eyes, and then suddenly...
You grasp a door handle, and something changes.
Right away, this door tells you that the room behind it is not like anything you have ever experienced. The tooled metal of the handle is cool to the touch, and yet there is warmth in knowing that the carved details have been worn almost smooth after a millennia of fingers have passed over its surface.
Exhale, close your eyes, and open the door. Already, the quality of light that passes behind your eyelids is of a softer kind. Open your eyes, and although the large window on the opposite wall is the same as before, the soft amber brilliance is reflected and refracted off the oak paneled walls and hardwood floor. But there are only four walls! The whole room is an open floor plan, like the temples of the ancient Greeks. Four concrete columns, one in each corner, support the ceiling. Upon closer inspection, you notice that the walls are not flat, and that there seems to be some kind of regular interval where the surface protrudes slightly to the interior.
You cautiously step over the threshold, and reach out to the closest adjacent wall. Your fingers graze the panel, and then it’s gone! It has swung away from the pressure by means of a vertical pivot. More confident now, after the initial shock has worn off, you grasp the corner of the panel and pull it towards the interior. But now, instead of just rotating, the whole section of wall glides away from the wall. You lean against one side and are carried around like a revolving door. Now the patterns make sense. Each extruded section is another bit of movable wall, stored against the main shell to open up space. You walk around, tentatively pulling and pushing at panels.
After a while, you have configured several interior spaces within the large room. As you surround yourself with the paneled walls, you can smell the richness of the materials: the dusty, mineral scent of concrete mingled with the heady aura of timber. It is calming and refreshing. The sounds of the outside world are absorbed by the walls, and the soft echoes of your footsteps on the smooth floor inspire tranquility.
You know that you will eventually have to leave, and that once you do, your perspective will be forever changed. You know that you will have to face those static, empty spaces again at some point, but not just yet...
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