Life on the Second Floor

"Life on the Second Floor" is the upper-level companion to Takeda's 2009 "First Floor" sheet, etched and aquatinted on copper. The print views a unit one storey above the ground — a different acoustic, a different relationship to the building's interior corridors, a slightly altered domestic atmosphere. Takeda holds her technical approach steady: structural drawing in etched line, tonal modelling in aquatint resists, no use of colour, no atmospheric depth. The flattened interior walls and perpendicular floor lines that run through her practice keep the space close and slightly compressed. As the second half of a pair, the print depends on its companion for full meaning — the two sheets read together as a study of how a single building stratifies its residents, a concern that recurs across Takeda's room-numbered "Interiors" series of the same year. Her sustained subject in 2009 is precisely this: the apartment building as a vertical archive of small, separate household lives.