The Living Room Project

FUNDED BY 4Culture and the City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture

PROJECT TEAM
Sara Zewde with Sloan Dawson

SERVICES PROVIDED
Design and Installation

The alley behind the University District’s post office is home to several homeless service organizations while also serving as a path of travel for students and other University of Washington affiliates. Sara Zewde and Sloan Dawson sited, designed, and installed an outdoor public living room as a means to temporarily blur boundaries across the housed/homeless divide, provoke dialogue on Seattle’s intensifying development pressure, and offer a moment of casual delight. The composition and materiality of the Living Room installation was designed to suspend the normalized condition of these parallel, non-intersecting worlds of the alley, by directly evoking the spatial construct of the living room and softening an otherwise harsh outdoor space. Provisions such as food, games, books, and Polaroid cameras served as devices for breaking the ice.

The result was a true canvas for casual interaction, contemplation, and creative engagement; a designed space for simply being.