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Herbarium of Interiors: A Milk Bar curated by India Mahdavi

HEAD Genève

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MAIA, Master of Arts en Architecture d’intérieur: Herbarium of Interiors. Milk Bar Installation. - HEAD - Genève, Michel Giesbrecht
MAIA, Master of Arts en Architecture d’intérieur: Herbarium of Interiors. Milk Bar Installation. - HEAD - Genève, Michel Giesbrecht

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Comments
Innovation
Functionality
Creativity
Eco-Social Impact
Total
JURY VOTES
Exhibition
7.72
6.39
8.07
5.34
6.88
Kaan Alpagut
Kaan Alpagut Design Manager, Workplace Experience at The Lego Group
Beautiful details and a very pleasa...
7.5
7
7.5
7.5
7.38
Donald Strum
Donald Strum President at Michael Graves Design
The interior reads as austere and u...
7.5
8
7.5
7.5
7.63
Alexander Fehre
Alexander Fehre Founder at Studio Alexander Fehre
7.5
7.5
7.5
7.5
7.5
Hilda Impey
Hilda Impey Creative Partner and Founder at Hilda Impey Studio
7
7
7
7
7
Wenke Lin
Wenke Lin Founder and Design Director at BDSD Boundless Design
It's an office environment that res...
8
7.5
8
8
7.88
Monika Choudhary
Monika Choudhary Cofounder and Creative Director at Habitat Architects
7
7.5
7.5
7.5
7.38
Sabine de Schutter
Sabine de Schutter Founder and CEO at Studio De Schutter
8
8
8
7.5
7.88
Yuko Tsukumo
Yuko Tsukumo General Manager at Nikken Sekkei
7
7.5
7.5
7.5
7.38
Maud Capet
Maud Capet Associate Principal - Interior Design at OBMI
7
7
7
7
7
Client
Salone del Mobile Milano
Floor area
240 ㎡
Completion
2021
Chief Curator
Studio Critic
Head of Department
Javier F. Contreras
Scientific Deputy
Valentina de Luigi
Product Design
Andrea Dalmas
Teaching Assistant
Manon Portera
Exhibition Assistant
Alice Proux
Photography
Michel Giesbrecht
Graphic Design
Director HEAD - Geneva
Jean-Pierre Greff
Students (concept Milk Bar)
Blanca Algarra & Lolita Gomez
Students
Kishan Asensio, Sarah Bentivigna, Dany-Sarah Champion, Robin Delerce, Nina D’Elia, Azadeh Djavanrouh, Marina Ezerskaia, Camila González, Elizaveta Krikun, Nourbonou Missident
Students
Filza Parmar, Patrycja Pawlik, Karen Pisoni, Louise Plassard, Léa Rime, Patris Sallaku, Camila González Tapia, Marion Vergne & Nobuyoshi Yokota

The Korova Bar is a fictional night bar from Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange. Within a dystopian atmosphere, the bar displays a series of naked lying caryatids serving “Moloko-Plus” (milk-plus), i.e. breast milk. Even though the original venue only existed as fiction, its transgressive environment has made the Korova Bar a cult, to the point of providing inspiration for several real nocturnal places around the world. Developed by students of MAIA, Master of Arts in Interior Architecture at HEAD - Genève, Milk Bar revisits Kubrick’s project for Alcova Milano 2021, exploring the role of image culture in the construction of contemporary interiors. 

The thinking of interior architecture is nowadays produced through different media and systems of representation. Texts, drawings, photographs, films, and their endless crossovers in online platforms have replaced in many cases the physical experience of space. The multidimensional condition of contemporary interiors is reminiscent of the polysemy of classic herbariums. A herbarium is a specimen that becomes its own image, fluctuating between the picture, the 1:1 model, and the object. Similarly, contemporary interiors take multiple directions, from the object to the image, from the media to the space.

Despite their diverse forms of existence, spaces materialize in various instances and iterations. This matters because contemporary thinking is relational. When envisioning, talking, and reflecting upon space, society does not discriminate between different disciplines. Designers, artists, filmmakers, programmers, or publicists all inform the agency of contemporary interiors through multiple formats, temporalities, and intersections. 

Herbarium of Interiors: Milk Bar thus aims to reframe the boundaries of interior architecture through parallel image-space domains, envisioning a new reality that bypasses traditional distinctions such as interior/exterior, public/private, original/sampled or tangible/mediated, ultimately reaffirming the role of interiors in the construction of contemporaneity.