writer’s block

The Writer’s Block is an AIA award-winning creative live-work loft. The space was designed for a couple who needed a space for collaboration, in an urban area. One spouse is a NYTimes bestselling author, and the other, a game designer. Both shared overlapping interests in fantasy environments.

The loft is zoned for dual-use, popularly known as live-work, a use set up specifically to address this kind of usage by artists. Our design focus therefore centered on the creation of a compact but fluid artistic loft, to put people at ease with both creative production and rest.

Taking cues from their work and interests, our design took inspiration from the Escher-like geometries of games like Monument Valley.

Similar to way that environment moves through tilted planes and angular walls, we envisioned the clients moving through a central creative area. An angular 3D entertainment area coupled with a silent writers desk on the other, within the lounge. Inlaid carpet bands emerge out of the custom millwork piece and climb up the walls as a bold graphic mural

Our design played on a premise of shifting and fluid relationship between the graphic and the spatial. It involved experimenting with several iterations of a single geometric idea, to aid each activity yet keep alive other possibilities.

It acts as spatial separation, production workhorse as well as a piece of furniture. A writing desk on one face, a shelf in another and a lounge elsewhere. The mural and floor finishes extend the concept of 2d-3d manipulation, interchangeably graphic and spatial. We nicknamed the solution Writer's Block.