Stranded at Home by Paulina Gallegos

“Stranded at Home” is a project that takes as inspiration the new reality of COVID-19 times and the need to enhance the relationship between private and common spaces in a domestic environment. The goal is to design a social housing project that inhabits the Lever House building in New York City.

Typically, in a social housing project, shared spaces are overlooked, and attention is mostly given to the private areas. This project pays equal attention to private and shared spaces by finding thresholds in-between spaces that allow the design to be adaptable. The interior design emphasizes built-in conditions rather than furniture as an opportunity to create unified spaces that utilize the total space available in the interior. There is a strong vertical communication with the staircase that shifts around per floor and creates thresholds in between. The project aims to provide enough space for people to enjoy public and private areas designed to provide natural light, flexibility of use, and views to the exterior. The interior design carefully considers making the occupants feel they are not enclosed in the same space because they are always moving in and out of these different private and shared interiorities.