Lampshade shower. By Nendo for Axor.

As first year students, my friends and I, thought it would be good to throw a party where each of us would decorate one room of our shared house. My contribution to the party was the dining room. In it, I suspended the dining table, chairs and rug upside down from the ceiling. Complete with a concept, centred on the notion of dislocated spatial queues, I retired confident it would be the star attraction of the party. It is still embarrassing to confess, that I imagined guests would be queuing to lay on the floor and stare at the installation, overawed at the space in which they rested! In the end, nobody dared enter, and the guests retired to the kitchen as they always do.

In a precise and calculated way, Oki Sato from the Japanese design firm Nendo, has found the same point of fear that I stumbled over as a student. He uses it with consummate skill to terrorise the viewer by suggesting that mixing water with electricity in the setting of the living room is something they could enjoy. A thrilling prospect! The installation goes by the name of “Water Dream”.

The lampshade shower is not a real product of course, it is part of an ongoing campaign by Axor, a German manufacturer of sanitary fixtures and fittings. They have been drawing attention to their products by re-imagining the bathroom as a room in which to live. Or, as our collective self preservation nerve tingles, a room in which you might not live.

Gratitude to Spoon and Tamago.