Blog Interior Scholarship
Bloggerin: Karolin Kull
“Pesamuna / Nest Egg – from Estonian nature to tabletop”

This semester I had a chance to work on a personal project. I have had this idea of a small lighting piece idling along in my head for quite some time. It has always been a topic of interest for me as lighting as such has an immense power over how one perceives space.

The idea started forming when I heard about a class that my acquaintance was having. They were working with prototyping and everyone had to use a metal flip switch for their object which then immediately caught my eye. Taking their brief as a starting point I developed my own challenge to work with comfort lighting.
The lighting is inspired by Stork nests. The White Stork is a frequent but monumental sight in Estonia, they mainly inhabit wetter open cultural landscapes and river basins. Storks also aren’t afraid to be in the surroundings of human settlements as they often build their homes on top of power poles. Growing up, I came across vast amounts of Stork cradles as they are easy to spot due to their size and placement.

The name of the lighting is Pesamuna, which in english would directly translate into nest egg, however, meaning-wise would be something or someone who is the youngest of the family who is held very dear (as the egg of the nest is).

Pesamuna is a series of indirect lighting which come in different sizes – for tabletop and floors, in plywood and metal cradles.

 

 

 

Blog Interior Scholarship
Bloggerin: Karolin Kull
“Compound Voids”

How to rethink the boundaries of our built environment and learn new ways to modulate its relationship to human bodies and sensations.

We were really fascinated with the architecture of “insane asylums” in the US from the 1800s. Hospitals for the mentally ill in the 1800s were designed to heal, but often were intensely overcrowded and deteriorating in condition, as well as left abandoned and unused for decades after. These asylums were meticulously designed, with architects and psychiatrists considering how light, air, and physical space affected the mental health of patients. The buildings were marked by curved corridors, a radial building footprint, and extremely specific programmed rooms. They often created a spooky, isolated environment, especially the buildings that remain abandoned today.

We took inspiration from the radial asylum buildings, creating a sequence that starts at the bottom of one corner of our 38x38x38cm cube and spirals upwards around the center. We achieved an eerie, confusing experience by designing only two room types to create repetition in our experiential sequence. One “meditative” type and one “isolating” type, both curved spaces. The isolating room is meant for a more confined solitary experience, as they are smaller in footprint and 4.2m tall. The meditative room allows a slightly more comfortable experience in terms of walking space, measuring 2.2m tall with a larger footprint.

Each room change is marked by a stair that follows the form of the room intersections. The rooms intersect with the outer walls of the cube to create apertures that let in different amounts of light into the interior. Two rooms intersect with the top face of the cube to create two organic apertures, opening up two isolating rooms with an even taller, never-ending “ceiling.”

 

Students: Karolin Kull and Xing Xing Shou

Professor: Jongwan Kwon

The semester has begun in a new environment, in Rhode Island School of Design.

One course I take conducts an investigation on human factors, by syllabus  “The relationship between the bodies and senses and space in the context of architecture and interior design”. We go to explore how human interaction influences the space by choosing two activities, one for individual and one for collective, and combine them into one monolithic dual artifact.

Working with a sketchbook – something that I do a lot –  became my personal point of research and socializing became the collective one.

Being in a different environment, my spatial behaviour changed – not having a “workstation” at home (a chair and a table) I noticed myself working on the floor. I observed myself transitioning from one plane to another and tried to translate my body movement into a solid form through picture studies. For the collective activity we worked together, rethinking the shape of our individual activities to accommodate socialization and modulation to our body-centric pieces.

Establishing a dialogue between the ground, seating and a working surface, through multiple trials, a dual artifact for this new situation was fabricated.

Students: Nina Myers, Gabriella Harary, Karolin Kull

Professor: Jongwan Kwon