Forced to further gentrify a given neighborhood, perpetuating the idea of an American architect as an [uncle tom] we attempt to fulfill our upper echelon clients and silently speak to our bottom brothers and sisters through this particular project. As we go through a rigorous design process, we construct temporary living spaces that connect to specific aspects of the surrounding built environment. A prismatic device was used as the foundation for the argument. In agreement with the age-old saying that if anyone gives you lemons that you can turn it into lemon and make money; we believe that we can take any project no matter how small or large with no initial message and turn it into something that speak positive volumes with out whispering a word. For us, that is what we fight to accomplish through modifying the our built environment. As a result, we created a hotel that has a resident artist on every floor that is the art for the hotel’s daily visitors. Through this we have become [pimps] in every sense of the word. The artists are using the visitors and vice verse in the same way the community hopefully uses our project. The fenestration manipulates light to enhance the feeling in each suite just as the garden pods grow vegetables for the use of the hotel’s restaurant. Lastly, we attempt imbue every possible aspect of the hotel with the same powerful tool that any normal prismatic device. Although, we realize that most dangerous thing, that anything can be used to make something including ourselves. Well knowingly, we expand the inhabitants knowledge and tastes for all types of creative media, and we hope that they use the same idea in their own lives. But at the end of the day, we conclude we are just designers and must imprison our ideas into the built environment to feed ourselves. At least we will eat very well soon.
Status: School Project
Location: Chicago, IL, US
My Role: Designer