DINING SANCTUARY

At the end of the day, the lifeless workstations of the open-plan office conjure up visions of graves in a cemetery. Under this atmosphere, Nora imagines the invisible woman in her particular dining desk. The extremely customized workstation provides a sanctuary for the ritual of eating, critiquing the unhygienic practice of having lunch at one's desk. The sanctification and ceremony of everydayness where the need for eating is abstracted into the desire for feeding and self-care is presented as a ceremonial space.

She takes up the strips of carpet, turns the desk upside down and encloses the workstation by piling many surrounding objects around it such as computer screen housings, printers, mice, fax/telephones and desktops, along with realms of paper and other office supplies. The sanctuary takes inspiration from a repair workshop where the invisible woman takes apart the electrical appliances, creating artefacts which she uses to heat up her food and drinks.

The nature of this space criticizes the conventional conception between interior and exterior in the current architectural production whereby the interior space, the open-plan office, is here an external space of the dining sanctuary. The protected space for office productivity is seen here as a violent jungle from which it is necessary to protect oneself.

The dining sanctuary establishes a spatial link between many of the other dream spaces of the project, articulating many constructions of the narrative, such as the transitional space where the invisible woman makes her ritual for drinking its “placebo” before climbing to the false ceiling flight simulator.