Rippling

Turn a revolving door, and the story changes from that second. Rippling is an interactive architectural film made from an architecture thesis.

Concept. The thesis, Rippling and Trickling: On Spatial Sociality and Isolation (M.Arch, UC Berkeley, 2025), argues that a floor plan decides who meets whom. Its building in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, holds two logics. Corridors let people pass without meeting: trickling. A matrix of rooms has no corridors, so to move on you must cross other rooms, and other people: rippling. Where four rooms meet, a revolving door connects one pair and closes off the rest.

Objectives. Rippling tests the plan as it is lived: in seconds, at doors. One dive sets the building in motion, and three storylines run on one clock: two people who keep missing each other; a visitor who takes the wrong painting, a copy; and the student who painted it.

Execution. The plan and model come straight from the thesis: 101 rooms and 67 revolving doors, lived in by over 500 people. A story engine gives each story door a queue and scripts no outcome. As the door stands, she stops two seconds to look at him through it; the visitor gets there first. Turned the other way, it hides him: she walks on and meets him at once; two storylines away, the copy never falls.

Viewers turn story doors as the story plays; if nobody has used or looked through a door yet, everything after that second is recomputed.

Printed in four inks, the building reads as a living drawing: in key beats, rooms away from the action fall back to line drawing on tracing paper. The interface stays quiet: names only for those in the beat, six lanes that fade during play, doors that answer only by turning. Viewers can reprint the film in 40 ink sets and eight pens, from halftone to hatching and pencil.

Impact. Plans are usually judged by area and adjacency; Rippling judges one by the encounters it makes, a method the thesis extends from a one-person home to a campus and a city block.