House of Melancholy
Helsinki, Finland, 2013
Eric Lapierre (our professor for the fall semester at Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio) asked us to design a house in Helsinki, drawing inspiration from a list of films previously selected by him.
The idea was to understand the dominant atmosphere in the movie and design a room marked by that atmosphere that would serve as a motto for the whole project.
This specific project was guided by the movie "Cries and Whispers" by Ingmar Bergman. A deeply melancholic movie, that deals with deaf, the inevitably unsatisfactory end of things, and loneliness.
The room that carries the soul of this project is the living room. A melancholic space that uses the same red color which we find in the movie, to provoke a sensation of being inside a body, of a visceral experience. This color is achieved through a velvet coating that also absorbs the noise and warms the space.
Off-centered we find a heavy black fireplace that digs a couch in the ground and creates a gravitational point.
The red velvet membrane, with its texture allied to the heaviness of the fireplace contributes to a dragged sense of movement and time, something that we associate with the feeling of melancholy.
The roof, sloped in the opposite direction to the terrain, makes the house almost disappear when seen from the street and grow in a protective and maternal manner towards the private garden.
As part of this exercise in the relation between architecture and fiction we had to write a short story on the house and it's inhabitants.
