Designers’ Saturday : #LOOSLAB

#LOOSLAB explores the role of image culture in the construction of contemporary interior spaces and their associated practices. The experiment questions our relationship to the image, and more generally to our perception of the world.

Originally modelled after Adolf Loos’ American Bar, #LOOSLAB allows to experience a space of illusion with no medium other than that of our senses. Between reality and decor, it subtly underlines our link to the image and imposes its own representation of reality. The proposal seeks to document and reflect upon the re-samplings and manipulations of the original scheme. It is no longer a copy or a simulacrum, but rather a radically more realistic instance than its original image.

Reflecting the postmodern society that has replaced a world of “text” by a world of “image”, the installation plays with three scenarios of contemporary imagery: the exterior, the interior and the fragment. As a game of symmetries, “three image-capsules plus a pavilion” revisit Adolf Loos’ American Bar, from where they establish a set of relationships: the outside of the bar is presented inside Mühlehof by means of its façade fragmentation in three rainy interiors, three vision capsules as a place from which to protect itself; the inside of the bar, on the other hand, is exposed naked to the exterior of the building as a brut pavilion, subjected to sophisticated changes of scale and materiality to re-sample a space that can only be accessed from within.

The project as a whole is articulated like an experimental setting, around a critical research on the construction and the perception of a visual experience while questioning the relation that it maintains with reality. By modifying the articulation between image, space and materiality from Adolf Loos’ bar, the project becomes at the same time: contextual by accepting the conditions of Mühlehof as decor for a digital and a physical milieu, shareable as it works as space and communication, and iconic through its historical references and their contemporary manipulations.

Take part in this reflection by following the Instagram account @looslab.