Victorian Playroom

About the project..

This visual studies seminar focused on ideas of ‘play’ as an entry into architectural language. We developed a vocabulary of forms and materials that are then unraveled in living spaces and landscapes embedded with color, texture and ornament.

For all that is odd and mundane, there is an architecture full of stuff, and an aesthetic of familiarity and cuteness. In Sianne Ngai’s book ‘Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting’ she presents the notion of ‘cuteness’ as one of ‘mute poetics’, where language detaches from experience and propels a ‘de-verbalizing effect’, an aesthetic experience as an act of submission, and as an access to the enchantment of form and material. ‘ ‘We have seen how cuteness cutifies the language of the aesthetic response it compels, a verbal mimesis underscoring the judging subject’s empathetic desire to reduce the distance between herself and the object’. Sianne Ngai.

The design process is done by a recursive feedback between analog mediums and digital ones. We began the seminar by creating fresh paint brushes that were digitally reproduced by a sequence of steps: paint, photo, scan, mesh & print. The last step was using these digitally recreated paintbrushes to then overlay on a ready made Victorian room. The process of adding an overlay onto a pre-existing object, followed by the deletion of the object results in the creation of a new composition that can be read through a new lens.