CHANGING ROOM

Changing Room is a full-scale installation commissioned by the Extension Gallery in Chicago. Conceived as both spatial provocation and material experiment, the installation explores the relationship between intimacy and public visibility through an immersive architectural skin. Constructed from 1,800 CNC-cut polycarbonate components, the surface is structurally self-supporting and suspended overhead, woven into a lightweight, translucent enclosure.

The project engages the psychological and physical conditions of transparency, reflectivity, and spatial threshold. Oblique views into the interior suggest occupancy while withholding full visual access. Entry is only possible by crawling, like a child, beneath the undulating lower edge—introducing a tension between bodily scale and spatial mobility. Changing Room becomes a space of transformation, an architectural atmosphere that interrupts the legibility of the gallery and proposes a moment of pause, retreat, and reorientation.

Changing Room evokes one of the few zones in public life where privacy, transformation, and performance intersect. The installation operates less as a programmatic object and more as a catalyst for temporary identity, a zone where roles shift and self-presentation is reimagined. The surface becomes a skin, ambiguous in function but rich in affect.

This spatial condition is realized through an economical material strategy. Using standard polycarbonate panels—an often-overlooked industrial product—the project applies digital tooling and manual assembly to rework the material into a suspended crystalline surface. The result is a three-dimensional, translucent envelope that reads as both curtain and structural veil.

Data: public space installation / Area: 16 x16 feet [5mx5m]

Photography: Barkow Photo / Installation and fabrication: EASTON COMBS

Unbuilt Work Merit Award

433 entries, 38 projects recognized, ‘CHANGING ROOM’, one of seven projects recognized in the unbuilt work category with the “Unbuilt Work Merit Award’ (Awarded prior to completion of project)

Publications: (forthcoming)