Shivani Pinapotu is a spatial thinker and designer interested in how space intersects with story, society and our sense of self.


Her earliest memory of a space was a pillowfort that her aunt had built when she was young. The experience of having a space that fit her and a place to call her own fascinated her beyond measure. She has since then been driven by the impact of empathy, wonder and a story well-told, and always finds herself reaching for these virtues to position herself within a project. Her practice is, therefore, an attempt to humanise the built environment.

She holds an MDes. in Interior Studies from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she concentrated in Exhibition and Narrative Environments, and has extensive experience in architecture, interiors, exhibitions and theatre design across India and the States.

She is presently working at Home Studios, Brooklyn.

Reach out to spinapot@gmail.com or find her on Linkedin, if you have anything in mind!

WORK ︎︎︎

She was twelve and on a vacation at her ancestral home in Hyderabad, India. It was when her aunt realized her boredom and disorientation within the bungalow that she pulled a few sheets over and around her bed, strung fairy lights across, and built her a pillowfort as a surprise. Overjoyed beyond belief, she camped in there for days altogether. She even let her tiny brother into her fortress; It was their kingdom one day, and a battleground on the other.

It fascinated her how all it took to belong to a place was a story to call her own.

As she grew older and into her profession as an architect, she wondered how the pillow fort still maintained its magic, not just for her but for people of all ages and all across the world, through all these years. Isn't it mind-blowing, that a construction such as a pillow-fort, so open-ended and incomplete, could bring so much joy- That there is no right way for it be, it just is and it still makes someone, somewhere feel safe and heard?


Richtel, Matt. “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Again”
New York Times, April 18, 2012.

To understand our amusement with pillow-forts, Matt Richtel, an acclaimed New York Times writer, reasons, “We all like space that fits us”. If that is so, what goes amiss in the spaces we design today? Do we laud the built space over the narrative, creating a protagonist out of the space instead of the person, pushing a generalized function for all to follow?

It makes her question, 'Can I design spaces that mould themselves to the multiple intersecting narratives of anyone who stumbles upon it, and can I make their story stand out? Can I bring back the magic and wonder?



She started her journey at RISD with that same idea of building pillow-forts- facilitating open-ended environments to create spaces that fit and which elicit childlike joy and wonder. Throughout her time here, she has tried to define it, understand it, unravel it and be inspired by it.

︎︎︎ Sample this mind-map from 2021 where she tried to understand the spatial logic of the pillowfort that could be emulated in the built environment. 



She wondered how she could expand on this magic and sense of wonder that she felt as a child, that she still feels when she builds a pillowfort in her room. Could this story become real?


She then took this seedling of thought to the city and wrote an investigative statement about what the principles of a pillowfort could imply outside of the domestic space- and with the help of a very supportive community at RISD, she arrived at her first research question- how can we soften a place?

In an illustration course, she took cues from the work of Kensuke Koike,  a visual artist known for the way he creates new images by repurposing them, and used the technique of kirigami to create spatial conditions out of surfaces- much the way a pillowfort is created out of recontextualising materials and spatial programs.




She prototyped a catalogue of softnesses in the built environment, as shown above.

She spent all of the two years at school disentangling the pillowfort in an attempt to derive a hypothesis that could potentially change the way we build places. Her graduate thesis, making pla(y)ces, is a story spun from this very idea.
 


Yes, she built a pillowfort for her thesis presentation :)

To this day, the pillowfort remains the reason why she aspires to design empathetic and inclusive spaces, mapping places beyond their coordinates and humbling the vastness of space through play and storytelling. It reminds her to look at the bigger picture and shows her how people can respond to spaces that fit and that allow them to just be.
Running on Cargo