At a site in Princeton, New Jersey’s central business district, an abandoned building is converted into a practicing architect’s home and studio. My proposal preserves the existing CMU structure in its entirety, while redefining the building’s formal identity, internal logic, and relationship to its context. The work of this studio was completed entirely through hand craftsmanship, a constraint that lead to a pronounced abstraction in both methodology and representation.

The proposed structure negotiates the tension produced by an overlap of domestic and work life, utilizing two distinct formal languages to materialize the necessary boundary between the two. The existing CMU structure becomes the building’s space-defining condition – subverted from a rectilinear grid to create thresholds, compel movement, and articulate interior and exterior space.