Hudson River dining room

thesis project

  • Hudson River dining room
  • Hudson River dining room
  • Hudson River dining room

Artist Pola Wickham and architect Sade Borghei collaborated to make the images shown here in order to investigate and exemplify this idea: "the space surrounding a painting affects the way it is perceived and simultaneously reveals the powerful impact painted space has on its surroundings."

The project was founded on the belief that an interdisciplinary approach to making both paintings and architecture would result in a spatial experience benefiting from the strengths of both disciplines.

In order to develop this process a brief was created as a framework with which to experiment with this idea: the brief - a waterfront cafe in New York, Manhattan: the site - the side of pier 38, the Hudson River, to the west of Greenwich Village.

Reacting to the vast panorama of this site, the paintings came to represent literally a more intimate internal space while the architecture came to act as a mediating device between the panorama and the paintings.

The construction of the architectural space flattens and frames both the exterior and interior views, as well as framing the paintings, in order to create a spatial complexity of indeterminate depths.

The views and the paintings shift their relationships between real and imagined space as one moves or turns one's head.

The patrons are invited to weave their way through the space of the cafe physically or visually thereby developing a changing personal relationship with the space, its inhabitants and the city beyond.