Threading Thresholds

Threading Thresholds is a housing study that treats the line between private apartment and shared corridor as a soft, inhabitable zone rather than a hard wall. By thickening doorways, vestibules, and edge conditions, the project asks whether everyday domestic life can be made more social without sacrificing privacy.

Premise

Most multifamily housing reduces the unit’s edge to a single door — a binary between “mine” and “everyone’s.” Threading Thresholds widens that edge, programming it with seating, storage, light wells, and small alcoves that belong to neither side completely. The building reads less as a stack of apartments and more as a continuous tissue of overlapping rooms.

Method

The studio examined a catalogue of historic and contemporary domestic thresholds, then translated each precedent into a sectional move that could be threaded through a single building. The resulting plan offsets unit boundaries floor by floor so that the corridor folds in and out of each apartment, never reading the same way twice.

Drawings

A combined sections sheet and a continuous long drawing register the building’s full vertical and horizontal extent. The oblique plan flattens the threaded thresholds into a single readable surface, making visible the layered relationships between corridor, unit, and shared in-between space.