Tarunima Nigam

Inversion

What happens when architecture becomes an emotional protagonist, when it doesn’t just house the story, but performs it? 

This thesis investigates how architectural space can shift from passive background to active emotional force within a narrative, using the Griffith Observatory as both site and set for a hypothetical television show. The project explores the unsettling subversion of the cute into the horrible reversal that transforms familiarity into unease and spatializes this transformation through design. 

By embedding narrative intent into materiality, form, and spatial arrangement, the Griffith Observatory is reimagined not as a static landmark but as a living, reactive character capable of evolving, deceiving, and misleading much like a human presence. Rather than building an entirely new fictional world, the focus is on a single location whose architecture plays a leading role in generating psychological tension. 

Drawing from horror, a genre that demands heightened awareness and discomfort, the design employs form, texture, and lighting to veil unease beneath playful or nostalgic surfaces. The resulting spatial language, rooted in contrasts like softness and threat or charm and distortion, turns Griffith Observatory into an architectural protagonist with its own narrative arc.