Pedagogic Speculations on SLEEP
models by Jonah Marrs, MArch Fall 2013, University of Torornto
Over the past fourteen years (2006 - present), one hundred and forty two architecture and interior design students have participated in the SLEEP Studio across three institutions: Parsons School of Design, the Daniels School of Architecture at the University of Toronto, and The Metropolis Program, Barcelona.
In undertaking sleep as a subject for a design studio, my initial approach was a pragmatic one - to offer students a common and readily identifiable activity that touched on a range of needs and concerns of architecture. An additional attraction was that sleep, in the earliest studios was an under-explored topic, having remained ancillary to broader architectural discussions of privacy or domesticity. However, sleep, the sleeping body, and dreaming, quickly emerged as an extended and extensive research project acquiring along the way a historical, theoretical, and critical framing that remains ongoing.
Out of the body of work that these students have produced, a third of the projects are to be included in the forthcoming book, TEST BED no.2: the architectures of sleep. The selected studio work, organized thematically, highlights the broad range of research the students conducted over the last thirteen years. Studios typically included the development of diagrams, the study of historical beds and architectural precedents of singular and collective sleep, and the design of a 1:1 object such as pillow or an oneiric artifact. A final architectural proposal whose programmatic focus was sleep would then follow from this research. Below are but four examples that stand as exemplars of the range of work produced.
I thank all of the students who have participated in the sleep studio for their enthusiasm, hard work, and thoughtful speculations on the future of sleep.
TEST BED no. 2: The Architectures of Sleep, images from forthcoming book
Selected Projects
Urban Pillow
Engaging in the existing discourse of sleep in art, in particular Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963), this “pillow” presents real-time analysis of the sleeper’s unconscious movement. The pillow functions both as a mechanism used to record the sleeper’s location throughout the night, and a device that attempts to penetrate the unconscious state through auditory biofeedback. As the sleeper moves from left to right, different keys are compressed, lowering ink wells and allowing drops of ink to absorb into layers of felt over the course of the evening. Simultaneously, a tone is produced at each key in an attempt to create an association between sound and the sleeper’s latent mind. In effect, the ink blots become a section taken through space, time, and the sleeper’s unconscious mind.
The Student Center’s “awake” program and Dormitory’ s “sleep” program are developed as two buildings intertwining on one site. These exist as interdependent forms with independent circulation paths, emulating qualities of the conscious and unconscious mind. Sleep program consists of both transient and resident sleep chambers that are read only as thick walls or looming volumes from the Student Center’s waking program. Light and view corridors pass through the building alluding to these adjacent concealed spaces. Sleep, as in Kahn’s Motherhouse, brackets the waking program, but herein does so three-dimensionally as it encompasses collective spaces. It is revealed only in its conspicuous absence, constructing the physical and psychological space for wakeful existence.
Student: Constance Vale, BArch Spring 2006, Parsons, The New School
Experimental Mattress for a Polyphasic Sleeper
Talking cues from Angelo Mosso’s 1884 human circulation balance, one of the first devices to measure cerebral activity during rest and cognitive states, this experimental mattress calibrated body movement during rest. Constructed out of a variety of wooden beads that are strung and stretched across a plywood frame thereby stimulating the sleepers pressure points inducing states of relaxation and ultimately sleep.
Students: Semi Park and Aura Phongsirivech, BFA AD Spring 2018, Parsons, The New School
24/7
24/7 is a proposal to redefine the working/living - or rather awake/asleep - typology. The project explores the dichotomy of work/rest and of wakefulness/sleep as interlaced states of being that overlap to create one’s fluctuating rhythm or loop. The project is an exploration of polyphasic sleeping as an alternate pattern, questioning whether perhaps the states of wakefulness and sleep are interchangeable. If a pattern of activity-rest-activity does in fact exist, what constitute this relation between rest and activity? When/how does this pattern overlap? Do individuals cross paths at ‘activity’ or do we perhaps interact more at ‘rest’? This infinite ‘loop’ and the relationship between each cycle becomes the central force in the creation and organization of spaces within this proposed typology.
Drawing questions and inspiration from Le Corbusier’s 1953 Dominican Monastery, Sainte Marie de La Tourette, 24/7 is a new office typology that investigates the cyclical nature and duality of asleep/awake. Sketches and model’s explore the spatial organization within each form, a ‘looping’ circulation that could allow for transition between different states of consciousness and bridge between the individual and communal spaces. Situated in the East Village, the site offers five satellites or circular ‘arenas’ for artist studios, open floor offices, gardening, eating and exercise. Spaces for rest and polyphasic sleep are scattered and integrated throughout these satellites, the connection between them as intermediate ground for meditation or varying states of ‘rest’.
Students: Aura Phongsirivech, BFA AD Spring 2018, Parsons, The New School
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