Open/closed: Rooms/corridors

Abstract

OPEN/CLOSED: ROOMS/CORRIDORS rethinks the conventional tradeshow experience by reimagining and reconfiguring walls, openings, and paths to produce a series of corridor-ish rooms and room-ish corridors.

Keywords:

• Interior architecture
• design-build
• interior design show
• corridor
• circulation
• room

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the talented project team of Ryerson School of Interior Design second-year students Willow Baker Jones, Monica Beckett, Amy Yan, and Margarita Yushina. We express our gratitude to this entire project team whose contributions to this project cannot be underestimated. We would also like to acknowledge Margarita Yushina for her visual illustrations which brought visual life to the work and provided a structure for this visual essay. We would also like to acknowledge Amy Yan’s contributions to circulation diagrams and Monica Beckett’s writing contributions on this project’s construction and installation process. We are grateful for the support from Adrian Kenny, lead technologist for the Creative Technology Lab at FCAD, during the on-site installation of this project as well as the Ryerson School of Interior Design 3D fabrication shop staff for their support during the offsite prefabrication of the project. This project received in-kind contributions from the Ryerson School of Interior Design as well as the Ryerson Faculty of Communication and Design Digital Fabrication Lab. Finally, we are grateful for the opportunity and invitation from Design Milk and Interior Design Show Toronto to design the 2019 Design Milkstand.

Land acknowledgement

This project took place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre located at 255 Front St W, Toronto, ON M5V 2W6, Canada. Toronto/Tkaronto is the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat and continues to be home to many Indigenous peoples. Together we all exist under the Dish With One Spoon Treaty and, as we learn from Indigenous teachings, it is our responsibility together to protect the land. We express our gratitude to the original caretakers of the land and are thankful to be working on this shared land. We also acknowledge that this land is covered by the Toronto Purchase of 1805 as known as Treaty 13 signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit, and the Williams Treaties signed with multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands. We recognize the land we are on was created through organized dispossession and colonial violence, and including Treaty 13 which has been contested and disputed for over 200 years. We invite readers to reflect on the lands beyond Toronto that you work and live on and to acknowledge and learn about the agreements of those lands, the nations that cared for and lived on those lands for thousands of years and continued to share and care for those lands today.

Disclosure statement

We the authors, Linda Zhang and Jonathon Anderson declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported through a design/build grant awarded by the Interior Design Show 2019.

Notes on contributors

Linda Zhang

Linda Zhang is a licensed architect, interior designer, artist, and educator. She is an assistant professor at Ryerson School of Interior Design and a principal at Studio Pararaum. She is a 2022 Artist in Residence at the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) and was a recipient of the 2019 Multicultural Fellow at NCECA, the 2017-2018 Boghosian Fellow at Syracuse University SOA as well as a 2017 Fellow at the Berlin Center for Art and Urbanistics. Her research areas include memory, cultural heritage, and identity as they indexically embodied through matter, material processes, and reproduction technologies. Email: [email protected]

Jonathon Anderson

Jonathon Anderson is an Associate Professor of Interior Design and Director of the Creative Technology Lab at FCAD. His work explores how industrial manufacturing and CNC technologies influence the design and making processes. As a result, the work is characterized by innovative and explorative methods that result in interconnected design, fine art, and technology solutions. From this non-traditional process emerges a provocative, complex design language that is visually communicated at varied scales and emphasizes corporeal and phenomenological experiences. To Jonathon, making is not only a practice, but a form of critical thinking. Email: [email protected]