Paris-based design agency conceived a hotel room concept for the 2019 Hôtel Métropole exhibition at the Pavillon de L’Arsenal. The central concept of the prototype makes the invisible visible, by highlighting consumption of water in a typical hotel room. Ciguë’s design responds to the urgent need for solutions that react to and reinvent the standard model of mindless resource consumption and wastage in light of the ongoing global environmental crisis.
“Historically hotels have been the reflection of their time, a sort of capsule of the way of living in a particular era,” explain the designers. “With our current times accelerating faster than ever, it, however, seems as if the evolution has wound down, the model has become almost stagnant and is being duplicated indefinitely with a quest focused more and more on comfort, perhaps as a way of forgetting that there is an urgency to react. Meanwhile, thousands of bathtubs are being filled, emptied and refilled as we speak.”
But where does this water come from? Where is it going? These questions have been the central point of this hotel room concept, through which ciguë aim to bring to light solutions that already exist, that, when brought together, create a loop where almost nothing is lost, and everything is reclaimed or transformed.
The design of the room is deliberately reduced to its most simple expression. A dismountable solid oak ‘skeleton’, an experimental platform made of mostly recycled natural materials provides the stage for a series of systems brought together to save 70% of the water usually consumed in a standard hotel room.
“On the roof of the open sky bedroom are two exposed water tanks; one to collect rainwater, the second to store the water made drinkable by the phyto-purification plants and activated carbon filters. The bathtub and the sink are connected to a system of pumps and filters that treat and replenish the water into the loop circuit. The transparent toilet bowl shows the separate collection of human urine and feces, both transformed into fertilizers and biomass.”
This project, conceived with the help of environmental engineering experts from Le Sommer Environment, pleads for a reevaluation of fundamental ideas around resource consumption. By fully showing what we usually tend to conceal, Ciguë demonstrate that solutions do exist and can become the starting point to a deeper reassessment of our way of living.
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