AN UNDERGRADUATE GUIDE TO Interior Decorating

Let your imagination run wild and picture the most unusual, crazy, interesting things you could do with your dorm room.

Perhaps you would create a shrine to Beavis and Butthead.

Or make everything, absolutely everything, orange.

Or maybe you would violate the most sacred of Harvard's regulations and paint fluorescent pink murals on the walls.

Harvard students have done all these things--and more.

In an effort to unearth the most fascinating rooms on campus, Melissa A. Weisman '95 of AgitProp, a fine arts organization, is running a year-long competition called "Playing with Space."

"AgitProp mobilizes visual arts to Harvard," Weisman says. "AgitProp is like a big roof, and under that roof are a lot of different rooms, including `Playing With Space.'"

Weisman's goal for "Playing with Space" is to "bring people together for non-political reasons, in a more personal way."

To accomplish this and to pick their favorite rooms, Weisman and her group of judges, Anna R. Dale '96, Edith A. Replogle '96 and Dorota Ostrowska, a visiting student, are "seeing the way [students] live through the environment they've designed for themselves."

They are conducting both a functional and aesthetic evaluation of the rooms, seeing "how creative people have been and how much personal vision they have invested" both in using and decorating space, Weisman says.

"The rooms reflect a great deal of personality, personal needs and tastes," she says. "Some people feel comfortable in a bare room, which I totally understand. Some people feel comfortable in much more elaborate surroundings."

The group has discovered that students' rooms reflect a lot about their inhabitants.

"If a room is really wonderful, it'll affect my way of seeing that person," Weisman says. "Your room is an extension of yourself."

They have also found that many of the more interesting rooms, but not all, contain collections--and they're not talking stamps and baseball cards.

"They're collectors. They have their passions," Weisman says. "There's something very extreme in their personality that they have to be surrounded by these objects. But they all manifest that in different ways."

The group tabled for several days this fall in each of the dining halls, asking people to sign up their own or their friends' rooms.

The crew from AgitProp is now in the middle of the months-long process of looking at rooms and interviewing the artists themselves.

"Some people have great stories to tell," she said. "What's good is the history behind the room, not the room itself."

The following descriptions and photographs come from but one of Weisman's cross-campus quests to find Harvard's most captivating rooms and to hear the tales of their interior decorators.

Sign Language

A visit to the Claverly Hall room of Eliot F. Pratt '94, reveals walls covered by a myriad of street signs and an extensive beer bottle collection.

"We filled up every space over every door" with bottles arranged by their country of origin, Pratt says.

In addition, signs collected from road-sides across the country include a stop sign, "Slow Children," "Tow Zone," "No Parking," "Clear Fire Lane" and, to continue the saloon theme, the front of a Heineken keg and bar mirror.

Finally, one wall features architectural surveys taken from a professor's office and another displays an army regiment's "Don't Tread on Me" flag.

The room also has large windows which face Linden Street--making the room a showcase.

"What I love about this room is that you can see everything from the outside," Weisman says.

Bottle Music

Yet another worldly beer bottle collection surfaces in the Mather House room of Michael A. Theriault '94, Allen J. Baler '94, Marsh Gardiner '95 and Mike Levy '94.

Their bottles fill the entire common room window which looks out onto the courtyard--acting as an artificial shade--as well as several shelves in the room.

"Each one of the beers represents a six-pack we've all drunk," Theriault says.

At three six-packs a week, they've now drunk and displayed more than 260 different beers from all over the world including Canada, Germany, and England. They were sampling their first African beer when Weisman arrived.

As a recent addition, they built custom shelves themselves to house their expanding collection, including their own homemade brew. "It felt very manly," Baler says.

Everybody coming out of the Mather dining hall sees the collection in the window.

"Many people pass in front of it, and everybody comments," Weisman says. "That's spectacular. It's a very deliberate act.

"I think this epitomizes a lot of college life, especially the male side of college life," she says. "There aren't a lot of women with beer bottle collections."

In contrast to their bottles, the Mather men also collect fish, which are housed in the common room's three tanks.

"They make us appear more sensitive," Baler says. "We're trying to draw a connection [between fish and beer]. They have liquid in common."

Long Live the King

And then there's the room straight out of Graceland.

The focal point of the Elvis memorial in the bedroom of Eliot House resident Margot A. McAnaney '94 is the afghan of the Elvis Presley stamp hanging on the wall.

She put glowing stars on his eyes and said that no matter where she is in the room, Elvis is always looking at her.

MaAnaney says she found the blanket in Manhattan, and as a collector of the Elvis stamps, she "just had to have it."

One of her walls also sports an Elvis clock from a Holyoke Center shop, a gift she received from a friend. "I think Elvis is just so funny," she says. "It's sort of a cult."

Where the Wild Things Are

To carry out the "Ivy" League tradition, one might swing by the garden room of Eliot resident William C. Weld '94.

He is growing a passionflower vine along one wall of the room and said that "it has a really spectacular bloom."

He has a duranta tree from Brazil, which in bloom has "lots of little purple flowers."

Weld also grows jasmine vine and gardenias in his room.

The plants have all come from cuttings he took while working in the horticulture industry for the last several summers.

In addition, his mantle houses a replica of the gargoyle which guards the door of St. John the Divine, the unfinished cathedral in New York City.

Finally, Weld has refinished the dresser, painted the fire door red and the bedroom door a shade of blue which he calls "Alice in Wonderland."

His common room, which he shares with roommates Douglas M. Kaden '94, David M. Lange '94, Anthony J. Laracuente '94, Hoon Lee '94, Jon-Peter F. Kelly '94 and Salaiman S. Mamdani '94, features a collection of stuffed bears experiencing different deaths--hanging, stabbing, shooting, pills, grenade and slit wrists.

The accompanying text says that the bears "represent art, society, government and history--all dead or dying in the foul, putrid, maggot-ridden, useless stench pool of the present."

"The humor they put into it is great," Weisman says.

Tea and Crumpets

For those in search of a more civilized motif, the Dudley Co-op abode of Sasha R. Wizansky '95 is sure to please.

While an "afternoon tea" sign on her door greets visitors to the room, a collection of teapots lines a shelf above the window and tea cups are printed on the quilt she made for her bed.

In addition, she has a collection of handmade fiddle-head teaspoons, characterized by their "curly-q handles," hanging from a board on her wall. She takes them down and uses them for her tea, but "in the meantime they look nice up there," she says.

"The escape of the tea ritual has always been very important to me," Wizansky says.

Most of her collection has come from yard sales and thrift shops.

She also has an old card catalog box from Widener Library, full of tapes, and a "velvet" copy of the Mona Lisa on the wall outside her room.

"It's always good to have a fuzzy Mona Lisa beside your door," she says.

Weisman has toured 50 rooms so far, and will probably select 10 or 20 victors to showcase in the spring.

The "Playing With Space" judges are planning a photography show in the Yard, and a possible video in the Carpenter Center or Science Center, for April.

"There's no rush," she says. "I'd rather it mature over time."

Weisman says she wants to make the showing as public as possible in order to "expose art in a very open way, so people can stumble across it."

She also wants "a few words to accompany the image. That doesn't take away from the room," she says. "It enhances it, it doesn't define it."

During the first months of her room search, Weisman has been both disappointed by and excited with what the group has found.

"There aren't so far a lot of incredible rooms," she says. "But there are some very good rooms."

"At first I was worried that there would be too many rooms," she says. "Now I'm not so concerned."

She attributes some of her findings to the fact that people are signing up their own rooms instead of revealing their friends' decorative achievements.

"What people think is incredible isn't necessarily so incredible because there's no way of evaluating how your room compares with other people's rooms," she says.

Weisman says the group has found women's rooms to be nicer and more interesting than men's.

"Maybe that's a personal prejudice," she says. "But there seems to be a lot more time invested in the women's rooms."

Weisman also says that the group's reactions to rooms have had little to do with size or architecture.

"Some of the smallest spaces are some of the grandest," she says. "They reflect those people's backgrounds, their personal history."

"You weave your way through these rooms. They seem very big. It's magical somehow," she says. "Suddenly you feel you're somehow in a different land."