We demand...
- Conversation, engagement withe the students who will eventually use the Creative Arts Center, which, considering the interdisciplinary goals of the design, could include almost anyone.
- Comfortable spaces for informal and flexible exchanges, not rigid tubs.
- A return to the thoughtful integration of the human subject into the design process. Student activities shouldn't be an afterthought dropped into a rendering from an image bank; we are not generic scale models meant to "animate" space.
What are your demands? Feel free to add your thoughts on the Living Room, the overall design, the process, anything as "comments." The larger the catalogue of critique that we can build in this forum, the more influence we can have on the building...
I immediately wonder whether or not the "Living Room" is a good operative metaphor for this space. Looking back on the those living rooms that I've truly appreciated in life, I don't think that they we're places of flexibility and exchange. Quite the opposite, actually. A living room is a space where someone who routinely inhabits a home or apartment can structure their ways of being into various private systems: configurations of furniture, lighting schemes, where to leave the portable phone, etc. No matter how banal these systems are, the living room takes on the role of an artifact of a very personal phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteDS+R's design, in that it places these personally themed spaces at the intersection of various circulation flows, intends to spectacularize what happens in the Living Room. This would seem to undermine the kind of comfortable mode of occupation that marks any real living room.