A small world built around one boy and his family.
project
Room For Max
client
Private
Team
Ong Ker-Shing, Joshua Comaroff, Marsha Ismail, Dominic Chia, Lua Jinwei
Room for Max is an inclusive sensory space built for one autistic boy in a home in Singapore, which has become an informal community center for neurodivergent children. It is a small but endlessly reconfigurable space, built according to extensive research into the needs and comforts of neurodivergent children. Rather than conform to the typical, clinical norms of sensory spaces, this new typology adopts a language of childhood fantasy; it is a playful and dream-like space that its young users can use to build their agency and a world of their own design.
The clients, Max’s parents, asked us to create a space where their son could play with friends—safely, and in a conducive environment. It would be a place for him to “regulate” (to find sensory comfort and lower levels of stress) and for his parents to “help grow his social circle by providing a safe space for other kids like him to have playdates.” This room would allow Max to make friends, but would also serve as the basis of a community of parents and their neurodiverse children. As such, this was a very unusual brief: a private room in a private home, that might become the center of a broader social world. dAt the same time, this would offer a space where Max can play with his younger siblings, in an environment that can cater to all of them, and evolve as they grow. This would include imaginative play, but also movie nights, and video-gaming sessions.
These grand ambitions would need to be accommodated within a very stringent envelope: a small basement room with a low ceiling, next to the pump-room of a swimming pool. The surrounding walls are concrete. This meant that all available space, including beneath the adjacent stairs, would need to be cleverly repurposed. Moreover, providing a quiet and safe space for neurodivergent children meant that the interior would be a collection of light, easily-cleaned cushions that interlock in novel ways.