SLEAP
TEAM: Nikos Michelis
Sleap is a leap towards the next level of our narcissist society. Many people of our generation are willing to trade their dignity to maintain the illusion that they are popular online. Sleap combines that desire with the perversion of people who enjoy to watch others. This platform benefits both sides.
The user can sleep free from exposing his privacy and the viewers will of surveillance can be fulfilled anytime. People want to rent a bed for the minimum possible wage, when they travel. The most important things are the experiences from their trips. Sleap is making their dream come true, to collect even more time from their experiences and to rent a bed in the minimum price possible.
Depending on their view count users can even get paid from their streaming. The architecture of this project is not important. As Rem Koolhaas said in his interview back in 1996 from Wired magazine that “People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming.” The design of the sleap room is indifferent, the only important ingredient to create one is the existence of a bed and a camera and of course a user.
Nowadays the significance of the digital world is even bigger than the real one for some people. The access to the digital world is only available through the proper equipment. The equipment is significant against the architectural elements of a house. That is visible in the project “A home is not a house” from Reyner Banham back in 1965, where his project shows clearly that the only necessary boundary from the exterior environment is a thin membrane. The focus of its inhabitants is on the center of the house, where the electronic equipment is located. It might be possible that the discipline of architecture is in crisis. Instead of designing buildings, a lot of architects are pursuing careers in different fields like ux and ui design, product design, game development, fashion design etc.
Although architecture has believers, like a religion. But the believers need a guide, who in our case is the architect. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said “The architect must be a prophet… a prophet in the true sense of the term… if he can’t see at least ten years ahead don’t call him an architect.” So architect, make your prophecy or go to sleep.