Eva Souren

Manifest voor de slaapkamer

Manifesto for the bedroom

A BEDROOM AS A HOUSE,  HUT,  NEST OR LAIR

With my ‘Manifesto for the bedroom’, I zoom in on the most personal room of the house and I reflect on how we can use architectural tools for the most intimate and private moments and encounters. In this project, I take the bedroom as the starting point for a spatial design of an architectural triptych. The triptych is an experiments pavilion, a laboratory where the value and the use of the bedroom can be reinvented. In this way, designers and users are incited to reflect on role and significance of this everyday space.

The pavilion houses three different bedrooms, each type in the form of a scenario, a collection of architectural scenes. Guests can book a story, as a result of which they are given access to a scenario for a 24-hour period. The scenarios stem from the three most important themes in my opinion that occur in the bedroom in addition to sleeping. The bedroom is much more than a space where we sleep, prepare ourselves for sleep and awake. It is the room that houses the most personal stories: secrets, memories, our fears, dreams and desires. I wanted to design the bedrooms in their entirety. In doing so, I considered both the hard, functional sides, such as form, materialisation, colour, scale, size and walking routes, as well as the soft elements: fantasy, feeling, emotions and thoughts. In order to be able to design with these hard and soft sides, I did countless form studies and I analysed a collection of bedrooms. For each bedroom, I described what I saw and what I knew, and I wrote an accompanying fantasy story. These are bundled in a publication: The Bedroom Collection (De Slaapkamer Collectie). In the form studies, I investigated design ingredients like sensuality and tactility, movement and physicality, texture and tactility in form and material.

My preliminary investigation helped me to find new ways to design spaces. Fantasy and intuition became part of the design method. The investigation was also the motive for drawing up a manifesto, the basis for my design.

Graduation committee: Wouter Kroeze (mentor), Ira Koers and Henri Borduin
Additional members for the exam: Elsbeth Falk and Chris Scheen