‘Magnets’ room, a Total Design proposal by Tatiana Andreeva, 1974
Tatiana Andreeva (b. 1951) was trained as both a mathematician and a textile artist. In her work, she combined the radical languages of the arts with mathematical formulas and scientific research. Over the course of her career at the All-Union Factory of Decorative Arts, she mostly created designs for limited-edition collections of silk scarves, airbrushed kimonos, and other Soviet haute-couture textile products.
In 1974, she was commissioned to create four experimental rooms at the Central Tourist House, a hotel in Moscow. Designed by architect Vladimir Kuzmin, this icon of socialist modernism was constructed between 1972 and 1980 as a venue for the Moscow Summer Olympics. The four immersive spaces, or ‘total designs’ as Andreeva termed them, were conceived with complementary geometric patterning systems for wallpapers, interior textiles, linoleum floorings, and even stained-glass shutters. Additionally, hotel guests were to receive vinyl raincoats in a matching geometric pattern for each room, thereby ‘merging’ with the surrounding interior and becoming a ‘walking element’ of the interior design concept. Mock-ups of the four rooms, including test fabrics, were executed with the utmost precision, yet the project was never fully realised due to ideological reasons.
The ‘Magnets’ room is an exploration and visualisation of the physical properties of a magnetic field, with a complex scientific formula translated into optical manifestations. The work incorporates twenty-one graphic modules, each built upon a colour gradation or combination. These give rise to optical effects, patterned forces of pull and push, which are the visual analogue of magnetic actions. The modules can be freely combined, operating in various proportions both vertically and horizontally. ‘Magnets’ was conceived as a universal system, one that can be equally applied to an architectural space, a group of people, or a single human being. Other rooms were dedicated to specific scientific phenomena, including ‘Light’ (sky), ‘Shadows’, and ‘Chemistry’ (love).
