Thursday Salute to Originals: Illustrating Famous Sitcom Spaces
As cold as it’s been here in Cleveland lately (temps in the negative!), it’s been hard to muster up the motivation to go outside and brave the elements. If you’re lucky enough to get an adult snow day, these frigid days are perfect for sitting relaxing on the couch, zoning out to movies and sitcom reruns. (There’s nothing quite like spending the day in your PJs with the company of Monica and Rachel, Jerry and Elaine, or Lucy and Ricky).
But if you’re Spanish interior designer and artist Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde, being a couch potato isn’t simply a pastime. Those hours of watching TV are absolutely essential in completing some of Lizarralde’s most unique (and perspective-altering) works of art. Using visual and verbal cues from television shows, Lizarralde chronicles and compiles information to map floor plans of famous TV residences.
Going beyond simply knowing a show’s theme song or characters’ names, Lizarralde’s artistic renditions give TV viewers an entirely new perspective on the show, adding distinct physical and spatial dimensions to the interiors that normally only serve as the episode backdrop.
Aside from offering a more tangible spatial perception to a fictitious show, one of the more fascinating things about these drawings is that they are fabricated entirely from the minimal and sporadic architectural clues embedded within the series. No site measurements, as-built CAD files, or 3D models to go off of here. Lizarralde acts as a detective, putting together bits and pieces of the architectural puzzle to create floor plans that bring spatial understanding and proximity to the show.
Next time you spend time vegging out with your beloved TV characters, take a minute to recognize the latent architectural undertones so integral to a series and its legacy. For recognizing the important role interior design plays in a show, and for giving us a better understanding of the atmosphere that surrounds our favorite characters, we salute Lizarraldo. His use of traditional designer form to bring an original sense of spatial realism to fictional satire may be deserving of a combination Golden Globe/AIA Gold Medal?
Image credits: Design Milk