The BEDROOM SESSIONS explore sleep as a socio-economic construct, navigating the tensions between the private and public spheres and the material and immaterial properties of the room.
To quote from Alice Rawsthorn’s contextual introduction to the Bedroom, to which you can listen in full below:
“Up until the 17th century, beds were placed randomly around homes, even monarchs could only have privacy by closing the curtains around them. Servants often slept in kitchens, usually the warmest places even in the grandest houses.
Bedrooms have continued to evolve ever since, and to adopt new roles, generally as private spaces for different members of the household: as playrooms for kids, quiet places where teenagers can do homework and interact online with friends; as home offices for home workers, and the one space in most homes that the younger occupants are allowed to decorate to express their own sensibilities, rather than their parents’."
The podcast "Prada Frames: Being Home" is a project produced by KoozArch in partnership with Prada, and curated by FormaFantasma for Prada. You can listen to episodes on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
BEDROOM: BEING INTIMATE with Gülsüm Baydar and Philippe Rahm
The session delves into the bedroom's role as a comfort zone, examining how heat, air, and humidity serve as architectural materials, while addressing tensions between the private and public spheres.
BEDROOM BEING ASLEEP with Matthew Wolf-Meyer
The session considers the bedroom as a space shaped by emerging sleep norms in 19th-century Europe and North America, and how these norms, in turn, have influenced socio-economic structures in societies.
Bios
Gülsüm Baydar teaches at the Architecture Department, Yaşar University, İzmir. She received her Ph.D. degree in architectural history at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught design, history, and theory courses at universities in the US, Singapore, Australia, and Turkey. Her work is situated at the intersections between architectural and other discourses, including psychoanalytical, postcolonial, feminist, and new materialist theories, to explore the spatial production of subjectivities. Her work appeared in Assemblage, Journal of Architectural Education, Society and Space, Signs, and Gender, Place and Culture. She is the co-editor of Postcolonial Space(s) and Negotiating Domesticity.
Philippe Rahm is an architect, principal in the office of “Philippe Rahm Architectes,” based in Paris, France. His work, which extends the field of architecture from the physiological to the meteorological, has received an international audience in the context of sustainability. He is a tenured associate professor at the National Superior School of Architecture in Versailles, France. In 2020, he curated the exhibition “Histoire naturelle de l'architecture” at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. “Climatic architecture,” a monographic book, is published in Fall 2023.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer is professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic University and author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (2012), Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (2019), Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (2020), and American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within (2024). He is the editor, with Denielle Elliott, of Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing (2023). His research focuses on the biology of everyday life, affective approaches to subjectivity, and posthuman bioethics.
Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and the author of critically acclaimed books on design, including Hello World: Where Design Meets Life, Design as an Attitude and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future. She is a co-founder with Paola Antonelli of the Design Emergency project to investigate design's role as a force for positive change. In all her work, Alice champions design's potential to address complex social, political and ecological challenges.
FormaFantasma is a research-based design studio investigating the ecological, historical, political and social forces shaping the discipline of design today. Whether designing for a client or developing self – initiated projects, the studio applies the same rigorous attention to context, processes and details. Formafantasma’s analytical nature translates in meticulous visual outcomes, products and strategies.
About
Prada Frames is a multidisciplinary symposium curated by FormaFantasma for Prada that explores the complex relationship between the natural environment and design. The collective effort aims to frame, analyse, contextualise, and define new perspectives on a plethora of themes. For its third edition titled ‘Being Home,’ Prada Frames examines the living environment as a framework to address contemporary challenges. The home is not merely a source of comfort; it acts as a shelter and an infrastructure of services. The extensive program of events takes place during Milan’s Salone del Mobile from Sunday, April 14 through Tuesday, April 16 2024 at the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi in Milan.
