A Room for Tomorrow is a minimalist hotel room prototype as part of the Hôtel Métropole exhibition at the Pavillon de L’Arsenal, designed by ciguë. Concieving a room for tomorrow, but the tomorrow that is near, very near, the one for which there is a real urgency to react and reinvent the model. Historically hotels have always been the reflection of their time, a sort of capsule of the way of living of a particular era. With our current times accelerating faster than ever, it however seems as if the evolution has wound down, the model has become almost stagnant and is being duplicated indefinitely with a quest focused more and more on comfort, perhaps as a way of forgetting that there is an urgency to react. Meanwhile, thousands of bathtubs are being filled, emptied and refilled as we speak. But where does this water come from? Where is it going? These questions have been the central point of this hotel room prototype, through which we aim to bring to light solutions that already exist, that when brought together create a loop where almost nothing is lost, everything is reclaimed or transformed.

The room is deliberately brought down to its most simple expression. A solid oak skeleton, dismountable, an experimental platform made of natural materials, recycled for the most part, staging a series of systems brought together to spare 70% of the water usually consumed in a standard hotel room. On the roof of the open sky bedroom are exposed two water tanks, one to collect rain water, the second to store the water made drinkable by the phytopurification plants and activated carbon filters. The bathtub and the sink are connected to a system of pumps and filters that treat and replenish the water into the loop circuit. The transparent toilet bowl shows the separate collection of human urine and feces, both transformed into fertilizers and biomass. This project, conceived with the precious help of environmental engineering experts Le Sommer Environment, pleads for a reappropriation of these fundamental subjects by the concepters and contracters. By fully showing what we usually tend to conceal, we demonstrate that solutions do exist and can be the starting point of a deeper reassessment on our way of living

Photography by Salem Mostefaoui, ciguë

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