Phuong Do

For a long time, affordable housing has been an issue for Los Angeles, an ever-growing city with a diminishing square footage. A recent trend to address this problem is to build more micro-units or co-living apartments in mass housing development, yet they all fail to provide quality interior space for living, storage and opportunities for forming a community. Located in East Hollywood, the current site is a relatively new apartment providing co-living suites to short-term tenants. This rising trend does not solve the problem of housing, only leading to overcrowding, and wasting excessive material for each own individual’s space. 

This thesis, False Volume, is a critique of the current landscape of housing, and an exploration of how to make use of the lack of spatial generosity, transforming it into a bigger space than it really is. The thesis investigates tried and true methodologies used by architects and non-architects to make the space feel bigger, from looking at Charles Moore, Hiromi Fujii, to the Vietnamese tube house (a common housing typology of where I am from). At the same time, the thesis investigates the power of storage in a domestic environment, how it not only provides a better quality living, but also can control the layout of the interior. Storage, working in tandem with false volume, is an agent dividing the space, piercing through the interior and exterior vertically, forcing the circulation to be around it. Consequentially, the thesis is about the coexistence of  the empty space and the filled up space: the nesting of walls and windows; the drawers, closet, and shelvings—they share the same significance and value.