NEW YORK, NY.- This winter’s METRO Show has more to marvel at and drink in than ever before—so much so that fair-goers can hardly be blamed for needing to take a break now and then. Fortunately, this year’s attendees will have the chance to relax in CloudSpace, leading-edge seating areas dreamed up by a crew of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students from the Department of Interior Design at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute.

Says Caroline Kerrigan Lerch, director of the METRO Show: “These lounge areas exemplify the very latest in design innovation—and what’s more, they mirror the aim of the METRO Show itself: to bridge the historic and the contemporary and present a cross-section of ideas, designs and genres.”

Pratt professors and students devised an approach that reflects both traditional and contemporary decorative arts—and they brilliantly employed plain, everyday items to carry out their concept: cardboard tubes and those flimsy plastic bags that chain stores use at checkout.

To create the seating for the lounges, the Pratt designers joined the tubes with hand-stitched twine, thus referencing the convention of upholstered furniture. The tubes are also decorated with a floral motif that makes a nod to the patterns commonly used in prototypical upholstery fabric.

In both lounges, the seating is sheltered by inflated white plastic bags, massed and hung to create a dome-like form. These bags—emblems of disposability—have been up-cycled into beautiful, arresting and functional components, at the same time subtly reminding us of the massive amount of trash generated by humanity. They also wake us up to the possibility of innovative reuse for usually tossed-away objects. Above the seating areas, illuminated images projected onto the plastic bags reveal the process behind the creation of the lounges. Making up the Pratt project team are Dina Digiovine-Florence, Hyun Kyu Han, Ga Im Kim, Hyunji Kim, Ji-Eun Kim, Yujin Kim, Ashely Kuo, Jin Yeop Lee, Jessie Lu, Riley Mellon, Jennifer Palomaa, Sran Shin, Kristin Lee, Molly Sherman and Deborah Schneiderman.

Concludes Kerrigan Lerch: “These Pratt-designed lounges—in combination with all of the choice offerings of METRO Show—are just another feather in the cap of METRO Show, making it the most exciting and not-to-bemissed show this season.”

The five-day METRO Show kicks off on January 22, and runs through January 26, 2014 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, New York.