KATHERINE YAOCHEN DU

A CLUB FOR MILLENNIALS

Core II Studio

Harvard Graduate School of Design

Instructor: Elizabeth Christoforetti

This project took a bottom-up approach to the problem of mediating its site by demanding the design of fragmentary windows, from which rooms, and ultimately, a building emerged. The site, an urban infill condition in the Bay Village neighborhood of Boston, sits at the intersection of residential and monumental scales, as well as different conditions of public and private that became important to mediate in the creation of a club for a very specific subset of millennials: the Asian Ball-Jointed Doll hobbyist.

Ball-Jointed Doll collectors meet in improvised spaces that are often hostile to an esoteric hobby associated with puerility, horror movie cliches, and fringe sexuality. Their dolls exist primarily in a world designed for larger bodies. Creating a dedicated space for these hobbyists stems from a desire to hide private practices from a judgmental public, while celebrating the very oddities that put the hobby under scrutiny. Windows in this project negotiate with the public through strategies of transparency and reticence that present a highly edited view of innocuous and acceptable program near window thresholds. Modifications to the dormer window allow both for view from the inside out, but not vice versa, and for the coexistence of doll and human scales. This secondary imperative of miniature scale colonizes the human-scale project, spatializing the presence of the “little other” at every turn.