Arts Thread

Lisa Maahsen was born in 1997 and grew up in Wil, eastern Switzerland. She is a passionate interior architect with a strong drive for innovation and improving the quality of life through design. Since her teenage years, when she started to travel with her family, she has been fascinated by how spaces affect people. Why do some feel natural and calming, and others oddly out of place? In 2017, this thought led to the beginning of her search with a one-year-long internshipin an architecture and a carpentry company. She gained insight into the creation of buildings and spaces and realized that this was the right path for her. Now determined to design spaces herself, she pursued her studies in Interior Architecture at the Technical University of Stuttgart (HfT) in 2018. During three years, she learned the art of spatial design with a deepening in housing, gastronomy, retail, office, wellness, sustainability, construction, and materiality. Furthermore, Lisa designedprojects in the field of furniture design and scenography. In her 5th Semester she decided to expand her knowledge through a different cultural perspective at ESDIR in Logroño, Spain. With a focus shift toward scenography and materiality, Lisa experienced new approaches when designing with additional prerequisites. Throughout her final semester, she developed the interior of a project for the Solar Decathlon Wuppertal competition, which was built and exhibited in life-size later in June 2022. In 2021 she happily received her Bachelor’s degree with the conviction to continue this career path with a higher focus on visual representation and innovation-based projects. In 2021 Lisa started her Master’s in Interior Architecture at HEAD Genève, seeking to strengthen and evolve her persona and interests. With a fascination for controlling well-being, the sense of comfort and atmosphere with the tools of interior architecture, art, and design, she wanted to take a more significant part in rethinking the current buildingindustry. During her Master’s, she further understood the usage of Virtual Reality, sustainability, and scenography. Lisa chose again to pursue a semester abroad at Kingston University in London for her 3rd semester. Her main project focused on communities and how architecture can support preserving diversity despite gentrification. Realizing how much more could be done for humanity with our available tools, Lisa decided to explore what novel techniques and materials we could use to make this world a more caring place for people. She is grateful for the opportunity to work toward improving the quality of life with her Master thesis project, Growing Shelter.