Rooms Like White Elephants

Archinect feature project, "White Elephant (Privately Soft)" by Jaminez Lai.

All images: White Elephant, by Jaminez Lai, via Bureau-Spectacular

One morning, I was sitting on my back porch, sipping coffee and lending my mind to idle musing, when I suddenly and completely out of the blue decided, with vocal proclamation, "I'm interested in architecture." The interest was not fleeting. Too, despite minor colour blindness, I've always had a workable eye for interior design. This, though undoubtedly inherited from my mother, may be more my self-diagnosed OCD than her inadvertent influence.

So it is that one boringly-typical, surf-less South Florida day, perusing BLDG BLOG, the avant-garde architecture blog operated by Geoff Manaugh, my half-cousin-whom-I've-not-yet-met (everyone's got at least one... c'mon people, let's bridge these gaps!), I came across this post of an incredible piece of interior architecture, "a building inside a building," as creator, Jaminez Lai, puts it. You know those oversized, opaque beach balls inside of which you sit, ensconced in a smaller-but-still-oversized beach ball? And your mates push you down a hill? This is the Fifth Ave. version of that, except there's no rolling down any hills. (Well, perhaps you could, if the slope were steep enough... Oh my God, I just got an idea!)And while Lai explains that his creation is "somewhere between super-furniture and a small house," I find it more reminiscent of a plastic jackstone held to a candle flame, melted and morphed.

It does provoke the imagination, though, does it not? Instantaneously, your family room is decorated--and with swagger... Imagine walking into the newest, poshist restaurant downtown with your beautiful significant other: "Booth or table?" asks the hostess. "Is there a distended, polygonal love seat available?" you enquire. "It's an hour's wait..." And this very well could resemble Yoda's planet Dagobah bachelor pad—if, of course, he habitually smoked extra-terrestrial hallucinogens and played with a welding device.

This is formless-meets-functionless; indeed, it's a massive middle finger to feng shui, serving but two purposes: Look cool, and comfortably seat two in-love non-claustrophobes. But, it's dynamic shape may make up for it. Take a look to the right and you'll see one amusing (particularly if intoxicated) method of rearrangement.

"In fact," says Manaugh in his post, "the sight of this thing looming all alone in an empty room makes it seem more powerful than it really is... it appears, in many ways, to invalidate the walls around it. In other words, why use the walls at all—why even furnish your own apartment—when you just drop two or three of these white elephants inside it." He's got a point. Go here to read his ideas on how to take this one step further.

(Reblogged from a previous page of this blog no longer in existence... poor page...)