Dr. Petra Voss

VP of Non-Euclidean Architecture

Designing buildings where the interior is larger than the exterior. It's not a bug. It's the geometry.

Euclidean geometry assumes that parallel lines never meet, that the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees, and that a building's interior cannot be larger than its exterior. My buildings violate all three assumptions. On purpose. At Impossible Structures Ltd., I design non-Euclidean architecture — buildings whose geometry operates on hyperbolic or elliptic principles rather than the flat Euclidean geometry that most architects lazily default to. In my buildings, hallways curve in directions that don't exist on a floor plan. Rooms contain more space than the walls should allow. Stairways arrive at floors that aren't between the floors they started from. My most celebrated project is the Voss Pavilion in Helsinki — a 200-square-meter building with 600 square meters of usable interior space. Building inspectors have measured it seven times. They get a different answer each time. This is expected. The building is geometrically inconsistent on purpose. I told them this. They're still measuring. I've designed 18 non-Euclidean structures across 9 countries. Safety record: impeccable, though 'safety' is a complex concept when emergency exits lead to rooms that didn't exist when the fire alarm was triggered. We include maps. The maps are approximate. All maps are approximate in non-Euclidean space. My PhD thesis was titled 'Inhabitable Contradictions: Toward a Practice of Impossible Space.' My mother asked what I do. I said, 'I make rooms that are bigger on the inside.' She said, 'Like a TARDIS?' I said yes. It's not like a TARDIS. But it's close enough for family dinners.