Urban Room

 

What is a HOME? Do we know how it feels not to have one? Can we - do we want to - do something about it, to envision an alternative?

 

For most of us HOME means LOVE, safety, comfort and belonging... However, for many among us home means pain, sorrow and loss. This project is about the unsung story of the street dwellers. Who are they? Where are they coming from? What is home for them? This prototype does not attempt to give answers but rather - to ask questions, to evoke empathy and to invite a dialogue. We wish to bring together those who are open to talk and those who are ready to do - to think, to give, to share; or just those who are curious and compassionate. Maybe, by bringing LOVE to this space we will be able to create, at least for a moment, a sense of HOME, warmth and HOPE

 

The design idea revolves around surprise and contradiction. Everything is solved with one element - the wall - by exploiting its spatial and iconographic capacities. With its help we aim to create two contrasting realities - IN and OUT, and the third one - of  the threshold - the WITHIN. First, is a deceptive notion of a welcoming house, perceived from the “exterior”. Then comes a bitter surprise of the unfulfilled anticipation, revealed by the absence of the “interior”, when passing through a door in the wall you step back into the street. The void house aims to provoke a sense of emptiness, absence and longing to something that should be there but is NOT. However, the wall itself suggest an escape, an ambiguity and forgiveness, by allowing to immerse into it and to play with it.

 

The unpleasant experience of the absence of home is not our ultimate goal, but only a trigger for further, hopeful and positive thinking and intentions, which we wish to instigate through playful interaction. What you discover after visiting the absent room and turning around is the other side of the wall, which serves as a bulletin board for expression and exchange. We wish to fill it in with stories, portraits, and alternative futures. Those bits of actual and suggested reality will be stored in a collection of “surprise boxes”, which would prompt interest for peeking in and allow interrogation and engagement by shifting them around, and clipping on and off the wall.

 

Some boxes will invite the user to leave a message. The wall itself will provide space for leaving notes and opinions, prompted by pre-posted sentence beginnings such as: “The home for me is...” or “I can give...” or “What I love about this place is...” In addition, the wall will appear as a map, suggesting city grid with street names and urban blocks. We hope that by providing this analogy, the play with the boxes will spark design thinking process and will be interpreted as a call for public participation and urban activism.