Fading letters on a tattered banner. Things left by the side of the road. Pawprints of a stray cat. Here you can come into contact with the memories hidden in Tokyo’s cityscape.
The artists behind this piece, EVERYDAY HOLIDAY SQUAD, theme most of their work around the concept of “outdoor play”. With that in mind, they created this experimental room like no other, a suite made of materials you would usually find outdoors.
If you look closely at the greenstone and the walls around the bed, you’ll notice that these are materials usually meant for the exterior of a home. The sofa is also made of materials often used outdoors. The manhole-like covers in the middle of the room can even be lifted and opened up. We’d love for you to customize the room in whatever way that suits you. On the other end of the room from the bed, there’s also a vending machine and an outdoor trash can. The vending machine sells original sticker designs that you can’t get anywhere else, which you can actually purchase.
Here, things that were originally meant to be left outside have been brought inside and transformed into furniture and decorative items. It’s as if a scene from the street outside has been snipped from reality and placed here. There are also little works of art in the form of keys hidden around the room. Part of the fun is trying to imagine why the keys were left in each spot.
Now that you’ve taken a good look around the room, let’s examine the Tokonome tiles painted with a blue glaze that make up the floor. Each one was made from using a 3-D scanner to scan objects on the streets and walls of Tokyo and then 3-D printed onto tiles. An umbrella someone dropped, somebody’s abandoned jacket, and the cornerstone from a building somewhere are just some parts of the city preserved in tile form. You can run your fingers over them, walk with bare feet on them, or even lie down on them. Recreate the cityscape around you as you take your time enjoying this Tokyo night.