BUREAU was tasked with designing a unique space for multi-faceted healing at the Floating Realities Clinic in Geneva, Switzerland.

A project about floating, mentally and bodily experiencing a certain state of suspension, in a rather safe space, where the outside is imaginary, evoked, lived uniquely through imagery.

From a very interiorized experience one is thrown outside, travelling in and out. Obviously, this was not the brief, but a poetic take on it, on how to create a world from which one can rest and imagine, evocative, abstract yet somewhat graspable. When one closes the eyes, the light that has been absorbed, lived transforms into colors, flashes of that connect with undefined sensations. Connecting realities, perceived in the space but also, most of them, outside of it.

The spaces in ORIGIN are about the progression towards that state, through colours, materials, living beings (plants) that accompany the experience of floating naked on a highly salted water pod.

The work of Shirana Shahbazi was a direct inspiration. The realness of her photography, but also the multiple possible(s) of the spaces that she proposes. Travels, journeys through sensations, lived realities, precise moments but also unprecise relations, liquid ones, without the need to explain, certainly with the impossibility to explain all of it, no need.

What has been proposed is a series of colours that wrap and unfold everything they encounter, opening the book of a space that proposes an insular pause, outside oif everything but in a strong interiority.

The progression attempts to fluidly sequence the steps of the user, taking her inside, from a sort of unreal, bi-dimensional image – the show window, or Jeff Wall’s light boxes – to the extreme intimacy of the water pod. Curtains, rails, vertical lines, horizontals surfaces, shelves, long chairs, more lines, tile grid as a guiding measure. All of it contributing to a strong subjectivity of perceptive frames that are altered by other patches of colours, space-holders.

Within that rather abstract journey, a series of ridiculous figurative elements perturb a possible purity, or integral coherence. Benches, an “objet-trouvé” from early 20th century urban park tradition. And the strangest reversed immorality emerging down from the ceiling, surrealist touch. Forms, colours, objects, living beings, spaces, all of them playfully smile at each other gathered in an intimate, timidly erotic, and calm trip.

Design: BUREAU
Photography: Dylan Perrenoud