B18_#174 // The Salon // Lloyd Lee

There had been a salon, once heavily used by intellectuals and the ‘right’ people who frequently discussed essential ideas and thinkings of the modern world. Present day, internet ‘forums’ have replaced the salon. The Salon was forgotten…

Less befitting to the purpose of noble ideas, internet forums had to be replaced by physical salons. Hence the new Conversation Room had to be born. The beginning of it was rather banal. A group of intellectuals in Paris, most of them students, took over a living room. The living room could have been a salon in the good old days. A beautiful moulding with chequered floor, the room seemed to advocate for some kind of formal grandeur. When it is hard to trace back the idea of a micro-typology, one must presume. 

The room was soon filled with two facing sofas. A TV was installed into one of the walls that flashes a different news channel every 5 minutes. Coffee tables had turned into drawers filled with different magazines and newspapers. Was this space good enough to hold decent conversations? Initially not, the room was on booking basis. People were much inclined to book a conference room to exchange ideas, right up until a radical change happened. The room was enclosed with EMI shielding bronze panels. People could not use their phones in the room anymore. More and more flocked into the room to experience a place where media prevailed, but nothing could be verified. 

A new salon was born. 

Can the Neo-salon win a fight against internet forums? 

Lloyd Lee is a part II architectural assistant who graduated the Architectural Association School of Architecture