Our experience as occupants of a particular setting begins with the impulse to instantaneously scrutinize everything. This impulse is sustained through an often precisely choreographed threshold. As architect and artist, my goal is to assist the occupant in maintaining his or her initial ontological wakefulness through staging often-temporary assemblies within a host space and thereby extend the passage sequence. This photo-essay illustrates the role of staging as means to reveal the experiential nature of lived space. In 2000 and 2007, I developed two performance-based productions, the first within the Des Moines Art Center’s Maytag Reflecting Pool and the second in a nineteenth-century receiving vault at Woodlawn Cemetery in Des Moines, Iowa. Both sites belong, by purpose, to the public as well as to the larger, all-inclusive, whole that is the universe in which we live