Urban Interiorities by Virginia Melnyk and Tiffany Dahlen

Urban Interiorities is a project by Virginia Melnyk and Tiffany Dahlen, regent graduates of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Working closely with Professor Ali Rahim, the students developed a “new approach to the night club experience” through novel modeling and rendering techniques, whereby generated surfaces—billowing, crenulated, orchid-like—exert intense visualizations of sensations.

Click through for more about the project.

Designed for a site situated at the buffer space between the trendy, youth-driven culture of Harajuku and the haute-couture of Omontesando, the night club merges both the youthful and luxurious into slick, mediated spaces. The club’s equally diverse program consists of an entry area, sushi restaurant, a sake bar, music lounge, and VIP rooms.

Melnyk tells us, “The project took four months to design and a myriad of changes through the development. It is not by chance that the project looks sweet like Candyland — much of our inspiration came from the sensations of taste and our perception of a visualization of these sensations. It is our hope that this project will push boundaries and leave viewers with a wider imagination of what architecture and design can be.”

The volume of the club is a milky white frame with a curious mix of areas on the interior: “sticky” and “sweet,” “pillowy,” and even “fibrous.” Movement through the club yields extremes of achingly synthetic notions of taste.

Aware of the ubiquity of swelling organic forms among students and practices alike, Melnyk and Dahlen did not stop at these heavily modeled zones. Instead, the sequence of programs is specific, provoking varying states of sensation and subsequent emotional responses as one passes through the interior spaces.

by Samuel Medina

posted in New Projects news

tagged New Projects, student work, Tiffany Dahlen, tokyo, university of pennsylvania, urban interiorities, Virginia Melnyk

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