This summer in London, I visited the Tate to see Do Ho Suh’s installation. Entire apartments were remade in translucent fabric: doorframes, corridors, kitchens, even the seams and edges of walls rendered in color so thin it felt like memory given form. They are monuments to impermanence, preserving the memory of rooms that no longer exist. Walking through them was like inhabiting someone else’s past. What struck me most was the scale: an intimate life made monumental inside one of the world’s largest museums.
Each September, as I unpack another Harvard dorm room, I feel a quieter version of the same logic. My gestures are smaller—stacking books, plugging in lamps, tugging at tangled cords—but the impulse is similar: to inscribe myself into a space that will never fully be mine. Suh presses paper against walls to capture their residue; I arrange the same belongings year after year, as if they could hold continuity. The objects hardly matter. What matters are the traces the rooms leave behind—the ways both spaces and objects continue to live in me long after I’ve packed everything back into cardboard.
Freshman year began in Matthews, a corner of the Yard alive with slamming doors and music spilling into hallways. College was new, and the room hummed with proximity—steps from my classes, the libraries, and everything that made Harvard feel immediate. Friends didn’t need to be invited—they appeared, collapsing distance by opening doors. The single was small but pulsed with noise. I don’t remember the walls so much as how they absorbed us, teaching me that community can be architecture as much as choice. Suh calls his rubbings “a way to carry the memory of space,” but for me, Matthews is carried as a constant presence.
The next fall, when I landed in Cabot, I moved into a five-man suite with my blockmates. The space felt cramped, but the common room made up for it: shoes scattered in corners, couches never empty, tables layered with cards, takeout containers, and half-finished homework. We spent hours there without realizing it, drifting in and out of conversations that never seemed to end. That room left me with something different: intimacy, immersion—the sense of dissolving into others until it was hard to tell where one life ended and another began.
Looking back, it feels like an inflection point. Rooms began to feel more solitary, more adult. That suite was the last time unpacking meant dissolving boundaries rather than simply arranging myself. Suh sometimes stitches fragments of different houses together—the Seoul home he grew up in, apartments from London or Berlin—into impossible hybrids. Cabot felt like that kind of hybrid: five people from different countries, towns, and backgrounds, stitched into one improbable space. The residue was not Suh’s furniture or outlines but more a blur of us living over and through each other.
Junior year fractured that continuity. After many of my blockmates transferred to the River, I felt stranded at the edge of campus, shuttle rides stretching every friendship into distance. My own room held little significance; the closeness I needed was in borrowed spaces—the couches and beds that mine could not provide. The Quad taught me that space can exclude as much as it holds. Suh’s rubbings make walls speak, pressing out every seam, switchplate, and imperfection. In the Quad, what surfaced wasn’t presence but absence, distance pressed into every wall.
When I finally made it to New Quincy in the spring, where my friends already were, it felt like a relief. Central. Efficient. Newly renovated? Not really. But there was a sterility to it, the sense of a space scrubbed of memory. I unpacked, lived, packed again, and the walls wiped themselves clean. Unlike Matthews or my Cabot suite, Quincy didn’t cling. Suh has said some rubbings fail, that no matter how hard you press, the texture doesn’t come through. That’s how Quincy felt: a surface that erases as much as it records.
Between these years were summers at home, in a bedroom that seemed determined not to move forward with me. The walls remained lined with the same posters I had taped up in high school, and the drawers were filled with the same clothes I no longer wore. It was uncanny to step back into this room each summer—as if the room had chosen to preserve a version of me I had already outgrown.
I felt the tension between my own growth and the space’s refusal to acknowledge it. The stillness was comforting at first, but over time it became a kind of estrangement. The chairs I once filled seemed ghostly in my absence. The room seemed to wait for someone I no longer was, and being inside it forced me to measure the distance between that frozen version of myself and the person I had become.
What I carried from that room was not noise or intimacy but quiet—a recognition that spaces can resist change, holding us in ways that feel both protective and suffocating at once. Suh’s rubbings pull outlines of hinges and corners into visibility, but my childhood bedroom offered me another kind of outline: the ghost of a self still hanging in the air, even as I moved past it. Its residue was stillness, time circling me while space remained intact.
Sublets were the opposite: layered, messy, worn by strangers. I inherited kitchens with other people’s pans, floors already scuffed, and furniture carrying their own ghosts. Those rooms taught me what Suh already knew: no room is ever just yours. They are accumulations, palimpsests of everyone who passed through. He calls it “collective witnessing,” the idea that spaces hold more than individual memory. Sublets made me part of that chain.
Now, in my senior year, I’m unpacking slowly. Maybe reluctantly. The objects are mostly the same, but heavier now—heavy with the places they’ve inhabited, the people they’ve touched, the semesters they’ve already endured. To settle in feels less like starting fresh than agreeing to be marked again, knowing I’ll have to leave. Unpacking has become less beginning than repetition, like unfolding fabric already worn thin with use.
Do Ho Suh once said he wanted to fit his childhood home into a suitcase. Without realizing it, I’ve been trying to do something similar. Each September, I’ve folded and unfolded fragments of past rooms into new ones, stitching their years together. I haven’t just lived in rooms; they’ve lived in me. Their marks are subtle, but they accumulate; they shape how I think about distance and closeness, belonging and loss, and what it means to grow older while carrying the residue of spaces that no longer exist.
As I drag boxes into New Quincy for the last time, I think of Suh pressing paper to walls, tracing hinges and seams until absence is made visible. My own archive is cruder: mattresses lugged across stairwells, posters taped and retaped, stiff couches that weren’t mine.
This is the paradox Suh captures: we don’t see how rooms mark us until we’ve already left them. What I’ve come to understand is that the marks don’t stay behind. They travel with us, stitched into how we move through the next space, how we learn to carry belonging and absence at once. Four years of packing and unpacking have taught me that memory accumulates less in the walls than in the body, and that weight doesn’t vanish when we graduate—it shapes the rooms we have yet to enter.
**This article was published by the Harvard Independent on 9.25.25**