Temple at Tiffany’s is a set of interior interventions that explore our complicated relationship with material culture. The project examines our aspirations of luxury, and questions widely accepted symbols of status and appearances. Through carefully curated associations with personalities like Audrey Hepburn and Beyonce, Tiffany’s epitomises elegance and sophistication. Tiffany’s is a symbol of prestige that operates through mechanisms of reification, fetishization, and phantasmagoria to construct meaning and produce objects that embody wealth and power. The interventions within the flagship Tiffany’s store on 5th Avenue in NYC engage with the tension inherent in these mechanisms of status--we adore and worship these figures and objects, yet they perpetuate stark inequalities. The interventions include a dystopian take on the Tiffany Diamond, an overnight boudoir, and a luxury supermarket with Tiffany’s mass merchandise. On the 7th floor, a VIP dreamscape invites one to indulge their fantasies among the 21st century gods.

Architecture embodies both history and visions of the future. The way we inhabit old buildings then can be a form of seance: a dialogue with the ghosts of our past as a way to grapple with history and take agency in constructing heritage. Utilizing Philadelphia’s landmark brutalist Roundhouse building--former home of the Philadelphia Police Department--this thesis explores how design can amplify or subvert experiences of place and history, enabling us to reimagine our relationship with the past as an active conversation, always in progress. This project reinvents the Roundhouse as an arts ecosystem, anchored by a nightclub, which serves an artist residency program and a luxury hotel for patrons of the arts. Revealing the architectural form allows moments that invert historic dynamics of power and subjectification, instead embracing interaction and enjoyment.