Liese Mortreu and Ellen Piot, Designer-Researchers

Liese Mortreu is a lecturer in Interior Design, an architect and a researcher whose work explores the relationship between spatial design, human experience and emotional meaning.

Ellen Piot is a lecturer and researcher in Interior Design, sharing the same perspective and sensibility, also being active in the Art field, she explores the boundaries between both landscapes.

They share a curiosity for the emotional space, investigating how the built environment is experienced, remembered and imagined. Bridging architectural practice, design-based research and design education, they explore how these subjective and embodied dimensions of space can inform meaningful approaches to spatial design and education.

Through their research project, ‘The inner sense of home’, they aim to map the emotional space, a vast landscape explored across different fields,  whose outcome hasn’t fully found its way into design education. They investigate how memories of the childhood home form the basis for an internalized spatial reference that shapes our encounters with other spaces throughout life. The research considers those memories as an intertwining of remembered and imagined spaces, forming an inner landscape of home that extends beyond the physical boundaries of the house.

Through conversations about childhood homes, mappings of its physical realities and the tangible reconstruction of its memories, the research explores the relationship between the house as it was and the home as it is remembered. The act of making becomes a way of revisiting these memories bodily, allowing fragments, sensations and associations to surface beyond conscious recollection. By bringing these reconstructed spaces into dialogue with their physical counterparts, the research aims to examine how personal meaning, bodily experience and everyday rituals shape our memory of space and inner home.