JAMAICA PLAIN, MA | 2025 | RESIDENTIAL
Situated within a rapidly densifying single-family neighborhood newly characterized by tense exposures and uncomfortable adjacencies between neighbors, Periscope House takes the periscope as its motivating force, choreographing turns and displacements of circulation and views within a tightly packed cubic volume. While most often deployed and seen as a voyeuristic device, the periscope becomes an anti-voyeuristic device at the urban scale within Periscope House. Curved walls and precise apertures gently reorient the body and the gaze to produce both extroverted views and introverted privacies, between exterior neighbors and interior occupants. The contradictory acts of turning within and looking afar, born of contradictory domestic desires, become linked ends of the periscope.
Team: J. Roc Jih (Architecture), Groom Construction (GC), Randy Crandon (Photographs, to be released pending publication)