Room Within A RoomWith the speculative Studiolo installation, Spanish practice HANGHAR explores the potential of nonprescriptive spaceByAdrian Madlener January 2, 2025Interiors, International (Luis Daz Daz)SHAREWorking to challenge the conventions attributed to increasingly constrained urban residential interiors, Madrid-based speculative architecture practiceHANGHARdebuts Studiolo, a room-within-a-room installation with no predetermined purpose. Domestic space has been overly commodified in the last century, as real estate has become much more prolific, said Eduardo Mediero, founder and principal of the Madrid-based practice HANGHAR. This has severely affected not only how we dwell but also how our homes are designed. The practice is deliberately intended to only exist for one decadeit will close in 2030and in this time, is committed to developing speculative work that tries to subvert market-driven impacts and decommodify residential architecture. It accomplishes this by suggesting different spatial configurations that can accommodate less prescriptive functions.In creating the form of the recently completed Studiolo project, Mediero and his team reexamined the importance of the room as an architectural entityone that has the potential for open, unconstrained activation. Our intention was not to assign a specific use to a space and try to make that use as efficient as possible, but rather to create a spatial structure that does not convey the use or program assigned to it, Mediero explains. We were interested in how inefficient environments can open up a vast array of possibilities of use. Drawing inspiration from Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina, specifically his paintingSaint Jerome in his Study(1475), HANGHAR introduced a deep-green, cabinet-like room within Medieros own central Madrid apartment. This space functions as his own little studio, the direct translation of the Italian word from which the project takes its name.Read more on aninteriormag.com. ApartmentsSpain