Marble, Wood, Paint. Rice.

Marble, Wood, Paint. Rice.

Marble, Wood, Paint. Rice. is an intervention made in a sequence of three rooms in a house within the framework of Design House, one of the main events of Design Week, and which in this occasion was part of Mexico City’s celebration as Design World Capital.

Marble, Wood, Paint. Rice. is a collaborative work between the architecture office EDAA and the audio-visual artist Yupica, where new materials overlap the existing ones to promote the emergence of new surfaces and textures, transcending the visual and pursuing a narrower relationship with time and space.

In the central room is inserted a Grigio Carnico continuous marble surface which allows to see behind it, separated from the wall, the original textures. By doing this, it is possible to give volume to a two-dimensional surface, enhancing the visual qualities that this specific marble provides. Once, this marble was used for the interior of financial institutions; nevertheless, the temporal closure of the marble quarry turned it into a scarce material. Now that the quarry reopened, the marble for the intervention partially covered the walls of a secondary room inside the house, a decision that tenses its symbolic function and its conventional historic use.

By understanding the hallway and the stairs as transition spaces between the central room and the rest of the house, they are transformed into resonance boxes that explore the oak wood as an organic envelope. While the volume of the hallway changes with panels and oblique ceilings, Yupica’s work –made with rice, the main raw material in his practice– is situated in the stairs along a light and sound control system. This audiovisual piece contributes to create an atmosphere that evidences the tactile, acoustic and reflecting qualities of the marble, the wood, the paint and the rice. In this way, the hallway and the stairs represent the beginning and the end of a sequence of spaces, atmospheres, sounds and materials.

The geometries and continuities of the planes create such containers where the textures and reflections are mixed to endow depth to the surfaces –literally and symbolically–. The apparent void that exists in the rooms gives direction to the principal content of the intervention: the sensorial experience of everyone who walks through. .