Open Research Office

Lucas Almássy
Image House
Fall 2024
Image House is a is a single-room residence developed entirely through JPEG images used as height maps. Rather than beginning with plan, section, or typological precedent, the project treats the raster image as a generative architectural instrument: every pixel becomes a vertical displacement, and every tonal variation becomes a potential spatial condition. Through Photoshop operations—noise, distortion, contrast, signal-to-noise manipulation, and the oscillation between figure and abstraction—the image is translated into terrain. The resulting house is not designed as a sequence of rooms, but as one continuous inhabitable topography.

The project proposes domestic space as an expanded bed: a landscape where one can sleep anywhere, at any moment, on a hill, in a valley, along a ridge, or within a softened depression. In doing so, House 1.6 challenges the conventional organization of domestic life around fixed furniture, fixed schedules, and fixed programs. Sleep is no longer confined to a bedroom or regulated by the normative rhythm of seven or eight hours; it becomes dispersed, opportunistic, and atmospheric. The house becomes a field of rest.


The project belongs to a lineage of architectural precedents that treat the floor, ground, or artificial landscape as the primary organizer of life: working from the theories espoused by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio in their projects of oblique function, SANAA’s Rolex Learning Center in in 2010, the Yokohama International Passenger Terminal from 2002, and more recent experiments like Christian Kerez’ Bahrain Car Parks in 2023. Yet House 1.6 shifts this lineage through the image itself and by drastically reducing the scale by which the inclinations effect every day life. By converting JPEG information into architecture, the project tests whether space can emerge from the strategic editing of images rather than from conventional drawing procedures. Topography, bed, room, and body become part of the same continuous surface. House 1.6 therefore positions the image not as a representation of architecture after the fact, but as a productive medium capable of generating new forms of habitation that could not have been conceived through traditional architectural methods.