When Broached showed at Design Days Dubai, 2013, our focus was squarely on the Middle East market. However, the major opportunity that came from attending the fair was meeting UCCA director Phil Tinari and agreeing to create their first ever design show.
The honor of being the UCCA’s first design exhibition was strong motivation to consider the presentation of Broached’s work within a larger exhibition design framework than had been considered in previous Broached exhibitions; knowing that the pieces needed to exist within an architectural framework, within a home.
Up until the UCCA show Broached projects focused on the migration of design ideas to Australia. The invitation to show in China meant we had to reverse this logic and look at some exceptional examples of Australians migrating to China.
When everything outside is foreign how do you create a space at home that is comforting and a retreat into memory and belonging? How do you create a space that provides some symbolic order between who you were are home and how you relate to this new culture? Thinking about the archetypal rooms where identity is constructed and presented. Traditionally for the man this is a study and for the woman it is a boudoir. Broached was drawn to these two antiquated gendered spaces and the potential for reimagining them within a contemporary context. For a modern professional couple what does a room of one’s own look like today? These were the concepts and questions around which Chen Lu and Broached built the Broached Retreat exhibition.
This broad research pulled focus when learning of Morrison of Peking. Whilst living in Beijing at the beginning of the 20th C the Australian doctor, adventurer and journalist George E Morrison established one of the great private libraries of Asia, it continues on today as the Tōyō Bunko library, Tokyo. The Morrison library motivated exploration into personal libraries and what the idea of ‘displayed erudition’ will mean in the digital age when the spines of books are swallowed into computer databases.
To retreat has multiple layers of meaning in English. In military terms it means to ‘fall back’ or remove oneself from a perilous front line. In tourism a retreat is a place of relaxation where yoga, a day spa, massage and meditation courses are probably offered. Psychologically a retreat is the refuge and safe ground of an introvert and it is this last meaning that is most resonant with the intentions of our pavilion.
Chen Lu designed a pavilion with two salons divided by a courtyard. Both spaces show the attributes of people who collect symbolic objects, people with archeological minds wanting to be surrounded by pieces that describe a cultural habit that no longer exists entirely in that form or function. The salons are not intended to be comfortable for anyone else except the imaginary author of the space. In this sense the rooms are psychological spaces.
The idea of clearing out the clutter of middle class interiors emerged in the late 19th C and reached its apotheosis with the modernist manifesto of the early 20th C. What was so enjoyable about creating the Broached Retreat pavilion was that working with Chen Lu ensured that the spaces would contain a decorative language unique to the occupier of each salon. Chen believes that modernism can be married with decoration and he applies it based on research and collaborative conversation.
The personalities of the couple who own this fictitious apartment were a major focus of our design conversations. We concluded for instance, that these spaces were not mutually exclusive, the rooms were occasionally shared, but one could not tell the other what was allowed to be in either room. The objects in each salon represent a purity of intention. The placement of a Broached Colonial Dream Lantern in both spaces shows their commitment to each other. But this choice also reflects their insistence on individual choice: the Dream Lantern can be configured in any number of ways and it is arranged differently in each room. To allow privacy within a relationship is a wonderful act of trust, that is what these two rooms aspire to convey.
