LIM College

by Jennifer Cohen

One of fondest memories that Erica and I have of our time spent in Italy was going out to dinner at the restaurant that is on the premises of the Castle that Keith, the Head of Design lives in. The castle was in a town called Vestignano, which was about an hour away from where we had been staying.

All around the castle there were cobblestone walkways and walls that were stories high.The dinner took place in what was once an olive-press room and is now a restaurant that serves 12 courses of the most amazing food in a unique medieval setting. A majority of the ingredients used in the dishes came from local sources and the chef was very eager to tell us all about the dishes.The dinner lasted about four hours and was filled with amazing food and conversation.

During this week we began to create a presentation for the pasta company Barilla's customer collaboration center. Grottini had previously renovated this space and wanted us to come up with unique ways to integrate communication elements.

The inspiration we gathered consisted of ideas like hanging signage, projections onto the floors and walls and greenery that would be placed in organic shaped holders. There were also some decorative elements that we thought could be effective ideas. Some of these included a laser cut lighting fixture that projects an image onto the floor as well as an optical illusion shelving unit who's content disappears as you move perspectives.

This week we also worked on a presentation for a pet store called Zampettando. This store’s main objective is creating an environment where the animals and customers feel comfortable.

The inspiration we gathered for this space consisted of friendly elements such as pet playgrounds, animal food buffets, underwater themed aquarium spaces and unique washing stations. Keith even began to draw sketches of what he anticipated the spaces would look like, which we also included in the presentation.

We also completed the presentations for Butterfly Twists this week. We went through every page of every presentation to make sure that its contents made sense with the rest of the presentation so we could send it off to the 3D render as inspiration for when he creates models of the spaces.