HERBARIUM OF INTERIORS - A Milk Bar
HEAD – Genève & India Mahdavi. Alcova Milan 2021
A herbarium is a specimen that becomes its own image. Being multiform, it fluctuates between the image, the 1:1 model, and the object. Similarly, contemporary interiors take multiple directions, from the object to the image, and from the media to the space. Thanks to their diverse forms of virtuality, spaces materialise in manifold instances and iterations.
Herbarium of Interiors explores the role of image culture in the construction of contemporary interiors. The project presents a collection of mythical interior spaces that have been edited endlessly thanks to their impact as images, appearing in different locations and temporalities while existing in the form of photographic, audiovisual or textual productions. The central room is dedicated to the Milk Bar, a totemic piece iterated from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange. Although the original venue only existed in fiction, its transgressive environment made the bar a cult project, to the point of providing inspiration for several real nocturnal places that predated the Instagram era.
Developed by students of MAIA, Master of Arts in Interior Architecture, Herbarium of Interiors revisits with India Mahdavi the Korova Bar for Alcova Milano 2021. The project thus aims to reframe the boundaries of interior architecture through parallel image-space domains, envisioning a new reality that bypasses traditional distinctions such as original/edited or tangible/mediated, ultimately reaffirming the role of interiors in the construction of contemporaneity.
