A Playful Cat
Back in architecture school we had a course on formal composition, and one of the teachers gave us a framework that sounded completely dorky at the time, especially wrapped in her postmodernist examples. She stated that to be productive with creativity we should start a project by naming an ‘image’ of it (‘образ’ in Russian, cant quite translate) as an adjective plus a noun - ‘a something something’. “Playful Cat”, “Lonely Island”, “Rainbow Gravity.” You can wait for an inspiration for a long time, she said, or start organizing a project around a something something and move forward, inspiration will come along, trust the process.
What she was describing has a real intellectual weight. Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space argued that a word can carry compressed emotional and phenomenological content as an array of images and associations - the nest, the shell, the corner; they hold an atmosphere in a single word. In cognitive terms what the teacher gave us, green teenagers, was a seed concept: a tight, memorable, emotionally loaded phrase that anchors decision-making across a long creative process. Dorky makes it sticky, don’t be afraid of the pun.
Silly example: say we’re designing a living room and the seed is “a playful cat.” Suddenly the Siamese breed comes to mind, which gives a palette almost for free: warm cream, soft taupe, points of darker contrast, smoky glass, and a flash of blue-green somewhere for the eyes. Furniture follows, something soft and fluffy but with playful, slightly mischievous shapes - a curved sofa, curvy sculptural lamp, nothing too serious. Textures lean into fur-adjacent softness. On the walls, abstract art with high-contrast color, maybe one piece that carries the blue-green eye-flash. Will it work? I don’t know but the start is there and it’s a solid one: the room has a character already. And it has little to do with actual cats, no allergies involved.
In an age of ever-growing options and choice fatigue, what if our decisions were made based on something that speaks to us, amiright cat lovers?
Bonus: a playful cat Brooklyn living room, so cozy 😊
