Cozy Wall/Wall Cozy at the Harvard GSD
This installation for the Experiments Wall at the Harvard Graduate School of Design was installed in the Spring of 2020. We considered this an opportunity to take what is normally a passive display and to build in an affordance for something that doesn’t exist in the building: Coziness. We used notions of comfort and the peculiarity of encountering an embodied wall to encourage shared experience in a space that can otherwise be seen as cold.
The wall operates as a shallow-depth experimental half room, holding loosely recognizable everyday objects (chairs, tables, tableware). These partially engaged bodies, produce a spatial bas-relief. At once weird and viscerally familiar, they insert a domestic realm into the public scale of architecture, here, the lobby of Gund Hall. They are somewhere between caryatid and tea cozy. We designed the fabric that stretches and folds to obscure, unite, and amplify the installation’s affordances (sitting, connecting, comforting, hugging, protecting).
The immersive wall seating pieces and tea tables can be rotated and repositioned, suggesting ways in which objects and architectural elements can encode multiple frontalities and multiple readings of surface, depth, and character. The rotated figures also facilitate different groupings of occupants. When turning towards one another the wall embraces an intimate conversation. Turning away provides a gestural moment of solace. They are bodies whose ergonomics privilege emotional connections as much as physical efficiencies. In re-evaluating the Secessionist tradition that blurs art, architecture, fashion, and interiors, we’re experimenting with these issues through the lens of gender, representation, and domesticity, perhaps favoring the radicality of Emilie Floges’ dress designs.
Images Credits: French 2D, Justin Knight, and Anita Khan. All rights reserved.
