Kaleidoscopic Home 🌈🌀✨

"We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." —George Bernard Shaw

What if a home could be spontaneously sculptural, rather than static — and how might that affect our health and well-being? The Kaleidoscopic Home exhibition was a speculative installation exploring how playful interventions in our home can enrich our everyday lives.

Playful awakening

Studies have shown that spaces that engage us in multiple ways can have positive physical and mental benefits, like boosting our immune system and promoting brain and cognitive health. Blue Zones are places on Earth where people live the longest and healthiest lives. Communities there live in environments that nudge them into natural movement.

Artists and architects Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa devoted their lives to the concept of reversible destiny. They believed ‘death is old-fashioned’ and that we could resist it by living in a perpetual state of instability. So they designed unusual, colourful, undulating homes that would keep residents on their toes. Their architecture is a sensorial awakening to remind us we are alive.

We know that when adults play, it can relieve stress and increase emotional well-being. Play, like meditation, tasks us with being present.

Sculptor and playground designer Isamu Noguchi believed sculpted, artistic environments should be part of everyday life. He thought children should experience a playground the way humans first experienced Earth: as a spectacular and complex place. Like Gins and Arakawa, Noguchi’s radical ideas were ahead of their time.