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- Rumpus Room
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- For the design of this child’s bedroom we used Maurice Sendak’s book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ and various stylized periods as precedents to construct a child’s dream den. Max the main character in the story finds comfort in the intimacy that his wolf costume provides. Our proposal envelops the child in a thick plush world at times monstrously fleshy and other times thin and taut. This alternating epidermal coating takes on various candy-like affects providing the visual feast without necessarily the gooey finish. The project challenges notions of figuration, the cartoon, appliqué, style and index, with an interest in 2d representation of complex material dynamics.
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- The room is stratified into three zones: the celestial, terrestrial and the rubber room. The celestial is loosely coated with cushions to create a marshmallow-taffy world. Below is the taut waxy rubber room, which adjoins the interior garden/bathroom and exterior, powdered and mounded landscape with expressed candy coated sprinklers. Connecting the various environments are golden and brass colored hardware in the form of chains and doorknobs.
- The celestial realm occupies the attic and is a small tight space where movement is confined to crawling. As such the celestial plan is coated with thick cushions and moveable friendly stuffed putti. Fleshiness was made possible through the folding and building up of foam layers in such a way that creases, folds and wrinkles are increased toward cloudlike affect.
- The Rubber room is a tightly wrapped space where protuberances are absorbed into the resin walls becoming surface features and nodes enabling caressing and pulling. The deep cavity behind the translucent green walls is illuminated to reveal strange patterns and shadows as the wall thickens and contracts to accommodate bedroom utilities.
- The terrestrial realm is an extension of the exterior powdered landscape, which penetrates the rubber room becoming seating, and cushions for a private wet/bathroom that functions as the threshold between hard and soft landscapes. The landscape’s watering system and bathroom plumbing are connected so that showerheads and faucets are modified sprinkler heads. Every sprinkler gets a light to illuminate its candy coating. They sparkle like little jewels in the tufted landscape. A grove of bamboo surrounds the bedroom and landscape providing privacy and security to the virtually open interior.
- Linking the celestial realm to the terrestrial and rubber rooms are a series of elaborate gold chain ladders and ropes. These allow the child to change elevation quickly and freely while also prying open the orifices that in their relaxed state seal off the plush attic sleeping room.
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- This project uses two types of pliable morphologies, those whose form is based on their ability to transform shape and those that produce an affect of pliability without being pliable. The orifice is constructed of both, where the foam’s material qualities and dynamics allow it to readjust to varying pressures while in the reflected ceiling plan the resin that surrounds the orifice artificially bulges and wrinkles to produce points of connection or to transition between flexible and inert material.