ALUO Dean’s Room

Interior design, more often than the architecture of buildings, represents a dangerous relationship between utilitarianism, originality and the expression of a “concept”. The furnishing of a space is the part of architecture that is in the closest, most intimate contact with its users. Through its use, we get to know, understand and tactilely embody the qualities of the space we are in and experience. This means that the furnishings are in a sense a functional interface between the human body and the abstraction of empty space. Even if it’s just a bench, a chair or a handle to lean on when you walk through a building.

The project to furnish the Dean’s Room at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design has been a long time in the making. On the one hand, because with it we have entered an institution that is imbued with art, that complements it and gives it an identity. On the other hand, because the project is located within an existing building on Erjavčeva Street, which is characterised by an extremely dynamic creative atmosphere of new creation, where the existing, i.e. the floors, walls, racks, painting stands, all the building furnishings, are merely a more or less anonymous platform, but at the same time a rich contextual cue.

Among the many possible approaches to the project, “do as little as possible, so almost nothing” would be the safest and most proven. But in doing so, we believe, we would run the risk of our intervention willingly crossing over from “character” to “ground”; and the latter could in no case achieve the spontaneity, casualness, randomness, flexibility and indeterminacy of Erjavec’s existing “ground”. Therefore, whatever his future fate, it was, in our opinion, only right to create a “character”.

We have created two elements that speak to their users and the space in which they are located in a unique way. The large, central table, which typologically combines the dean’s workplace with a conference table, erases the distance between the manager and his colleagues. The position at the table is the same for everyone, the dean does not stand up and join his colleagues, on the contrary, the colleagues sit at the dean’s table. If the allegory of the bench under the village lime tree seems exaggerated, the central position nevertheless embodies the strong symbolic meaning of the hearth in the centre of the space.

The second character is the wall cupboard. A mostly utilitarian collection of horizontal panels – shelves – is interrupted by a large red body, which rests awkwardly on the ground like “another man”, a statue in space. Its upside-down form echoes the spatial feature, a semicircular niche, which houses a beautiful sculpture of Tycho.

Authors of the project BLENKUŠ Matej, CIMPERMAN Katja, CVETREŽNIK Anja