As directing office of PROOFFLab Studio Makkink & Bey regularly invites two teams of designers, a tandem of an architecture office and a design office, one Dutch and one foreign European team, to design two projects for PROOFFLab. Each time, the tandem engineers a new variation that adds to a series of work related products, according to a given theme which originates from the ‘PROOFFLab at Home’ framework of ideas. PROOFFLab will single out a suitable platform to showcase new concepts in an ‘active showroom’ of workscapes. Ideally, we want to make the PROOFFLab into a work hotel, a work space inside an active showroom where working, studying and living can literally blend.
During Salone del Mobile 2013 in Milan, PROOFFLab presents work in progress by Studio Makkink & Bey and two projects by an invited tandem of designers and architects. Belgian collective jij’s (architects de vylder, vinck, taillieu and Serge Vandenhove) and Dutch designers Studio Maarten Kolk & Guus Kusters were asked to create a project that centrals around acoustics. Both teams took the idea of sound and space much further and focussed on how a space is experiences, on how to rearrange and disrupt a space.
Acoustics
Of all sensorial impressions, sound seems to be the most intangible and not necessarily bound tone specific physical source location. When sound enters our ears, it feels as if it penetrates our bodies much deeper that when visual impressions enter our eyes, or a surface is felt. Sound is bodiless and it’s hard to tell where ti begins or where it ends. In spatial relation to sound, creating intervals with obstacles can give shape to sound and stop it from traveling further. Barriers such as walls, space partitions, curtains, furniture and surface materials and the arrangements of furnishings change the way we experience a room. The objects that were designed by the tandem of designers are both tools to change the perception of a space by orchestrating its layout.