Masha Travina
House of Many Walls
From the fourth-year undergraduate option studio Drawing from Memory, Spring 2021
Faculty: Ania Jaworska
About the studio:
The everyday architectural environments we navigate often play a significant role in our memories. However, our impressions of these spaces tend to be hazy and incomplete, and our recollections of what transpired are often skewed, disproportionate, or exaggerated. In this studio, we mined our memories in order to extract what we could about a particular time and space, filling in the gaps with assumptions, references, reconstructions, and approximations. We then probed these impressions and indulged in an effort to reconstruct the ephemeral in order to produce a heightened and fictionalized architectural space.
About the project:
The main idea of the project is to capture my childhood memories by transforming them into surreal architectural gestures. Taking a “furniture wall”—the iconic wooden furniture set that has been in my grandparents’ house since the Soviet era—as a precedent, the project consists of six different spaces or walls that investigate and rethink the notion of storing one’s whole life in a large floor-to-ceiling furniture set.