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.