Project by Youri Kravtchenko, Javier Fernandez Contreras & India Mahdavi | Construction management by Alice Proux, Manon Portera | Photo by ©HEAD - Geneva | Michel Giesbierg | Drawings by ©HEAD – Genève | Blanca Algarra & Lolita Gomez | 2021 | HEAD – Genève
A herbarium is a collection of plant specimens. The specimen can be multi-format, somewhere between object, image or 1:1 model. Collected, it tends to become its own image. Are contemporary interiors herbarium specimens, spaces whose image oscillates between fiction and representation? Over the past two years, students in the MAIA Master of Arts in Interior Architecture program have been developing their herbarium of interiors, revisiting several emblematic interiors, both institutional and commercial, real and fictional, with architect and designer India Mahdavi.
For the Salone Internazionale del Mobile 2021, HEAD - Geneva moves to Alcova as part of the Fuorisalone and reinvents the Korova Milk Bar, the iconic bar from Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange (1971). Exploring the role of image culture in the construction of contemporary interiors, the project aims to redefine the boundaries of interior architecture through parallel image-space domains. It envisages a new reality that bypasses traditional distinctions such as interior/exterior, public/private, original/sample or real/image, with the aim of definitively confirming the role of interiors in the construction of contemporaneity.
