Architecture of the Indimensionable

Architects are nothing if not prodigious dimensioners of space. Their drawings take the unruly world and submit it to the disciplinary hand of metrology: twenty foot column bays, sixteen inches on center between studs, details specified to the millimeter. All that dimensioning serves a purpose. These carefully orchestrated measures form an inside and an outside; follow the seal of a window detail, nothing is getting past that line. Or so architects like to think. But as even the most casual of horror fans knows, such security is only ever an illusion: the more pristine your house in the suburbs, the more ghastly is its past; despite your barricades, the ghouls are smashing through the windows; and that dead body you’ve hidden beneath your floorboards will rise up to haunt your dreams.For despite architects’ allegiance to the hard logic of lines and tape measures, there is an indimensionable aspect to space—and in the indimensionable, not all is as it seems. A door is not just a d