Fourth Wall House

Cinema and its derivative media have encoded a set of conventions in our visual language. These visual devices turn people into an AUDIENCE, prepared to engage in images constructed as an ILLUSION, all in the service of a narrative. Cinema has been able to go where architecture cannot—into incongruous spatial arrangements and temporally disjunctive sequences. Architecture can, however, serve as an armature for cinematic experiments, blurring the boundaries that separate our interior and exterior lives.

A residence, especially since the advent of visual media such as cinema, photography, television, and the internet, has become a stage for an exterior public. Beyond mere voyeurism, we are now part of a permanent audience, seeing cinema not as a parallel to the real world, but the real world as cinematic. Cinema is the baseline for our visual language, and, at times, real life confusingly parallels cinema.

In film and theater, the Fourth Wall is the imaginary surface through which an audience perceives the action. Actors perform in a space of three walls, typically ignoring the invisible fourth as the audience watches through it. A movie audience watches the implied depths of unfolding cinematic spaces flatten as a projection onto the screen surface.

Fourth-Wall House uses the devices of cinema to construct narratives steeped in everyday stories as well as fantasy and illusion, turning the mere act of peering into a neighbor’s house a cinematic experience. By using cameras and image projections (live feeds as well as broadcast and recorded images), the house introduces various media into a residential space. It uses mirrors, translucent screens, lights that cast shadows and printed imagery to assemble an illusory world, seen to the ever-present audience as both real events and fabricated realities.