The bed is not always in the way
An ordinary bed makes a continuous claim on a room. It occupies its rectangle while you sleep, while you eat and while you are somewhere else. Colombo’s proposal asked whether some of that claim could become temporary.
In the 1972 exhibition press record, two beds and a table can be drawn out from beneath the central platform. The upper part contains two small retreat spaces, with storage between them. The surrounding floor becomes useful in different ways as parts are brought into service.1
The important movement is not simply an ingenious drawer sliding out. It is a change in the room’s occupation. A place that was open a moment ago can become a place to sleep or work, then relinquish that use.
Four volumes need a space between them
The other elements contain a wardrobe, a kitchen and a bathroom. Each is conceived as an independent volume. The title sounds singular, but the home is made through the relationship between several parts.
DASH’s study at TU Delft presents the work as a transformable domestic arrangement rather than a collection of conventional household objects. Its drawings show possible positions and the space occupied as the components open.23
That last part is easy to overlook. A compact closed object does not eliminate the room required for using it. A bed needs somewhere to extend; a person needs somewhere to stand. The empty floor between the units is part of the proposition, as active as the coloured shells.
The exhibition had to be built
The project appeared in the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, after Colombo’s death in 1971. The museum’s record names Ignazia Favata as collaborator and documents the firms involved in producing the environment.1
It also exposes a useful difference between an intended material and an exhibition solution. Parts planned as plastic shells were realised in sprayed wood for the display. The white and brightly coloured surfaces can conceal that distinction in photographs.
An exhibition model is therefore evidence of both an idea and a particular act of making it visible. It should not be mistaken for a fully developed housing system that had already resolved every service connection and production problem.
A home changes through the day
The proposal invites a simple exercise: imagine the same floor in the morning, afternoon and evening. Which parts of the furniture are open? Where can somebody walk? Which activity has temporarily taken over?
The answers bring the design down from a futuristic image to ordinary routines. Total Furnishing Unit is most interesting at the moment when a piece moves and the room becomes available for another part of the day.